To whom it may concern

Submission: Customer and Product Data Bill

Rewiring Aotearoa represents everyday New Zealanders in the energy system, we advocate for an equitable energy transition that brings everyone along. Our responsibility is to advocate for what we believe to be the optimal policy settings for enabling electrification and reducing distributional inequity.

We strongly endorse the problem definition that underpins the Customer and Product Data Bill. We agree that access to information is critical, that consumers and innovators are facing unjustifiable barriers to accessing that data, and that consumer data should be liberated to create value for consumers. We agree that current settings need to change.

However, we are not convinced that the proposed Consumer and Data Product Bill has landed on the optimal solution.

There is a relevant saying: ‘Information wants to be free’. While the proposed Consumer and Data Product Bill takes a step in that direction, it does not offer the level of freedom that could be technically accomplished, nor the level of freedom that is likely to unlock the maximum level of innovation.

Internationally, the best-practice approach to data is to create data commons. A data commons is a cloud-based software platform with a governance structure that allows a community to manage, analyse and share its data. The typical approach is to make data as open as possible while maintaining necessary restrictions, often implemented through open licensing and other access control measures. This enables the maximum potential for innovation, because it lowers the entry barriers for innovators and enables competition which will ultimately benefit consumers.

By contrast, the Consumer and Data Product Bill takes a much more restrictive approach to data access– i.e. access is granted to accredited third-parties. Rather than ‘let the information be free’, this approach is likely to create a state-sanctioned oligopoly where only a select group of accredited companies can benefit from the data.

Although these accredited companies may use the data to help consumers reduce their costs of electricity, the proposed regime may not drive down the costs of data and data analysis as low as an open, competitive regime.

Essentially, the Consumer and Data Product Bill will change data from a private good (excludable and rivalrous) to a club good (excludable and non-rivalrous). The shift away from treating data as a private good is commendable, because this obstructs the nature of data to be as free as possible. However, it falls short of treating data as a commons good (non-excludable and rivalrous) or a public good (non-excludable and non-rivalrous). These latter categories better capture the nature of data and we believe that managing the data accordingly will unleash its full potential.

It is important to note, the energy data that is useful can often be less intrusive than the energy data made part of the scheme. For example, privacy may be of concern when accessing individual household bills over time periods, yet, this data can be simply aggregated in many ways to remove any privacy concerns. Octopus energy’s machine learning data access project is a good example of this, which analyses individual home data and anonymises it into distinct (artificial) examples e.g. “3 bedroom, Wellington, Gas water, no solar” is an archetype it produces, based on real data, but the data provided is an artificial simulation to remove any privacy concerns.

Future systems need to include a Data governance framework. This is critical, because it will enable ways to manage unanticipated problems, (which are inevitable in these types of schemes).

We are happy to speak to this submission Nga mihi Mike Casey on behalf of Rewiring Aotearoa.

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