What’s behind the incoming power price rises?
Rises in the country’s national grid charges are behind the most recent warning of power price increases, an expert says.
It comes as Mercury became the most recent company to notify expected price increases.
Consumer NZ’s head of Powerswitch Paul Fuge said the “lines” part of the bill is behind the increase, which means the price of power lines in the street were expected to rise.
“That’s because we are entering the new regulatory period. The Commerce Commission controls the prices for those organisations and those prices will be increasing from 1 April,” Fuge told Morning Report.
“There’s no avoiding price increases. We generally seeing price increases across the board.”
Want to know who to thank for your crippling electricity price rises?
Why John Key of course!
You’ll remember he privatised 49% of our hydro power which created the market we are all suffering from now!
Look what part Privatisation has done to our electricity market…
Electricity sector privatisation is destroying manufacturing industry
In 2022 and 2023, First Union, the NZ Council of Trade Unions, and 350 Aotearoa released a series of reports entitled Generating Scarcity, about the impact of the partial privatisation of Meridian, Mighty River Power (now Mercury) and Genesis under the previous National government.
They argued that in the decade since those privatisations, the gentailers – Meridian, Mercury, Genesis and Contact (fully privatised in 1999) – paid out $10.8 billion in dividends to shareholders, while total generating capacity increased by one measly percent.
For every dollar invested in new capacity over that period, the gentailers paid out $2.41 in dividends. From 2016 to 2020, gentailer dividends were around four times the scale of new investment, while consented capacity simply wasn’t built.
Gentailer debt levels remain strikingly low, especially in light of last year’s gentailer-funded “The Future is Electric” report, whose own preferred investment pathway would see annual generating capacity increase by 163 percent in the coming 25 or so years.
Our grid leans heavily on hydro, and therefore needs an engineered solution to the so-called “dry year problem”. Hedging the network with wind, solar and battery storage is the cheapest fix, but it still costs money.
We all pay the price for underinvestment. With high mortgage rates and rising rents, low-income households can’t always afford to keep their homes warm and dry, lumping costs onto the struggling health system.
…so as you open your power bills and scream in shock at the prices, thank John Key and wonder how this current Government’s privatisation agenda will cost you in the future as well.
People are getting so close to realising…
…so close.
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Not just someone who pee’s in the shower or pulls ponytails
Every analyst told Key this would happen but like Luxon, he’s sorted, price increases, high unemployment and a low wage economy don’t affect Key.
I go back as far as Max Bradford who split the Electricity department into companies that had to make a profit and pay a dividend.
He was to architect that allowed Donkey to win an election by giving away cheap shares. Thanks you greedy pricks.
And because of that he has been the only polly I’ve ever written to including with it a lot of linguistic abuse, aimed directly at him, paying him exactly the respect he deserved.
Wow such a hard man, yes…write a letter/email, that’ll show him.
Such a keyboard warrior eh Dick?
civil society mate. hard men have no more say than anyone else – unless you’re a fascist and a bigot. I say strangle the shareholders of dividends until the price crashes and do a share buy back. Don’t expect the government of business to dream this up. or using sovereign bonds for lending. total reprobates and troglodytes in our political leadership have no imagination.
Im right was looking in the mirror when he wrote his keyboard warrior post, being the hard man he is, what a dick.
Absolutely. It was National’s Max Bradford who separated off the lines companies under the preposterous pretence that this would make electricity cheaper for consumers, when in reality it was to provide another income stream for the “ haves”.
It was Wellington’s mayor shoe salesman Mark Blumsky who flogged off his local lines company to the richest man in Hong Kong before shooting through to bask in the warmth of the Cook Islands leaving Wellingtonians shivering and freezing in houses many cannot afford to heat, babies being admitted to hospital at 2am with breathing difficulties, old people sitting around in libraries or travelling around in buses all day to keep warm, and incredibly, the re-emergence of conditions like chilblains on an everyday basis for adults and children alike.
Even worse, consumers who own their own homes are legally responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the power lines from the point where they leave the power poles out on the pot-holed road, which is as unrealistic and ruthless as driving skilled Kiwis off- shore and replacing them with exploitable foreigners from other countries, while spouting sanctimonious poppycock about being a multi-cultural country, when every utility is engineered to financially benefit the few but not the majority who provide the hard- earned dosh to keep them running.
And when we have a puppet PM proclaiming himself as rich, sorted, and entitled, something is rotten in a country which many of our pioneering ancestors worked nard to build in conditions of which these privileged self- serving politicians have zilch knowledge or concern, but benefit well from.
Don’t forget that when Luxon got himself made head of the Nats, he recounted how Key arrived at his home with whitebait, but how the pre- neolib Labour politicians sat brainstorming with fish’n’chips, not whitebait, or tobacco boy Bishop’s crayfish.
Michael Stiassney from Korda Mentha sold off the lines business to the Honkers billionaire when he ran Vector.
Jesus, that’s a tragic photograph. And jonky’s just a freeloader hitched to roger douglas’s neoliberalism.
We can fix it. All we have to do is re label the banks as hostile foreign entities and arrest the managers pending their deportation to Australia. Then, we divvy up the spoils and mandate voting. Job. Done. Thank me later.
There was that referendum not to sell genesis but the arrogant prick like that Seymour just ignored it and flogged off our public wealth anyway. Neoliberalism has destroyed any respect and belief in our corrupt political system. Why so many have nothing to lose by emigrating.
Martyn – The NZ Government owns 51% of many of those Corporations…
Yes, and the govt is letting it happen cos they are pro shareholders.
You heard the stats – 1% increase in generation. 240% return to investors on money spent on infrastructure.
Paul – Correct
Can you provide a stat to where the 49% funds from the private buy out went, is the government still using those funds, say, for infrastructure investment or is it gone, curious?
Corrupt Gnat – Some of it funded irrigation schemes across the South Island, paid off Government debt, and the rest was put back into those Corporations.
I mean actual stats , a financial balance sheet if you will rather than generalizations. How much was used to pay off debt for example as that does not create revenue.
There’s just so much wrong with that photo.
Wheel If that photo is the $6 million helicopter man prepping to take Luxon for a ride following the route of Flight MH 370, and Mrs Shipley with them for she keeps resurfacing like an unwanted wart, plus every politician from the Hutt Valley, then it is a very nice photo.
To John Key and his son…
“Real men eat steak”
capital tax all that shit back
Tea boot has hit the nail on the head .We are fucked for ever till the workers can earn a decent wage that will cover a decent living standard .Why did I work for 50 years for fuck all scraping away daily to survive .?And now with two incomes the government is still propping up families with indirect subsidies for business .WFF and rent subsidies along with child support and family tax credits are just corporate wellfare by another name or names in this case .My son works 6 days a week ,just to see half his wage go on a place to live then the rest is swallowed up on the other essentials like food ,power insurance and education for his kids .We need to hit pause and take a good look at the real problem in the world which is greed and the share holders of companies that allow that greed to happen in the first place .Take musk ,what does he do in his organisation that makes him get paid billions of share holders money every year .Those are the type of weak share holders that enable those type of people to do what they do and just rape every other share holder