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There’s been an understandable focus on the price of electricity recently, with fears we may be in for a repeat of the wholesale debacle of 2024 as our hydro lake levels remain low. The Energy Competition Taskforce made another announcement about levelling the playing field for independent retailers and removing preferential pricing for the gentailers’ retail arms. Just like the previous announcement that talked about moves to level the playing field for customers with solar and batteries, this is another positive step towards a fairer system, but it’s not guaranteed to bring electricity prices down, as Mike Casey told Andrew Dickens on Newstalk ZB.
Many of the innovations in the energy sector come from independent retailers, so it's good that there will be fairer competition. But the future increases in our bills are likely to come from poles and wires, not generation. What is more likely to bring prices down is widespread adoption of solar and batteries, and a recent paper in Nature suggested that solar and storage would be the cheapest energy source in most of the world by 2030, with most of the switch happening by 2027. With our world-class hydro scheme, we already have a lot of the storage built, so New Zealand is in a good position in comparison to many other countries and we’re looking a gift horse in the mouth if we don’t follow the money.
Could reframing energy independence as a national security issue, rather than a climate one, be our best chance to go electric? The Spinoff collects a range of views from various commentators like Liam Dann, Pattrick Smellie and Joel McManus and shows that it has clearly got the attention of the media and should be getting the attention of our politicians.
Read moreDownload"There is quite a lot of talk about EV price depreciation and resale value, but we are not really talking about petrol car price depreciation. In the next five years or so, we may start to see a big game of petrol car hot potato, first between New Zealanders, and then between other countries." That was Mike Casey writing in Newsroom in January last year but, after the current crisis, it might happen more quickly than expected.
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