View this submission guide as a document

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What is this?

MBIE is seeking views on:

• Collaboration and standardisation: Whether there are changes the Government could make to encourage greater collaboration between EDBs and more consistent processes, pricing approaches and customer interfaces. This is intended to help realise efficiencies of scale without requiring structural consolidation.
  
  
• More responsive economic regulation: Options to strengthen the Commerce Commission’s regulatory toolkit, including improved performance monitoring and benchmarking, expanded information-gathering powers, additional regulatory tools between information disclosure and price-quality regulation, more flexible regulatory approaches, and easier pathways for applying stronger regulation where warranted.
  
  
• Stronger governance and accountability: Options to clarify EDB objectives, improve oversight of non-core investments, strengthen governance capability, and ensure ownership arrangements remain fit for purpose as investment needs and sector complexity increase.” 

Rewiring Aotearoa believes that the current way EDBs are regulated is fundamentally not fit for purpose. It unnecessarily increases the bills of New Zealanders, provides limited accountability for unnecessary spending of consumer money, and overall makes the economy less productive. 

There are three fundamental ways to lower the costs from EDBs (and therefore consumer bills).

1. Increase utilisation. Batteries and smart usage of electric appliances can now enable, for minimal cost, a network to increase its utilisation of assets. More electrons flowing over the same assets means lower cost per unit. Today EDBs are barely incentivised to do this (if at all), and yet it is likely to be one of the most important ways to build a lower cost energy system into the future.
   
   
2. Increase standardisation and efficiency. There is significant variation between EDBs around the country, from those doing meaningful innovation that benefits consumers, to the many that are wedded to the past. Standardising how EDBs calculate Long-Run Marginal Costs, provide connection permissions, evaluate non-network solutions, and calculate pricing methodology, could significantly reduce unnecessary complexity and therefore the cost of operating New Zealand’s energy system. As seen with the failed Alpine-Aurora collaboration, voluntary approaches to standardisation and efficiency may not be successful.
3. Actually regulate them with some rigour. Today the Commerce Commission regulates EDBs in what we see as a laissez faire approach. The Commerce Commission should be provided with the powers, capability, and confidence it needs to deliver on its mandate to protect the long term interests of New Zealand consumers. For example, networks should have to provide evidence that they are making the most of innovation like non-network solutions to lower their network costs, which is not the case today. 

Why does this matter?

Energy is a fundamental cost that impacts almost all aspects of daily life, from heating our homes to running our farms and businesses, to what we pay for essentials that themselves had to be produced with high-cost energy. 

We are not going to sugarcoat it: The New Zealand energy system is broken, and produces significant profits for energy companies more than it seeks to provide affordable abundant electricity to the communities it was built for. We are a nation in service to its energy system; we should have an energy system which serves our nation.

The last few years of electricity bill increases have been largely driven by the EDB component of bills rather than generation costs, with increases already locked in for the next couple of years. This consultation is the biggest opportunity in years to ensure EDBs are all actively supporting the transition to affordable, abundant and reliable New Zealand-made energy, rather than some acting against it.

We know that your voice matters. Previously we’ve seen the voice of the community back our call for a fairer deal on payments for solar power exported back to the network at peak times. Consumers now get paid higher and fairer (more cost reflective) rates as a result. Homes with solar can now export more largely because of a similar push. 

So we encourage you to tell your story about how the energy system could be improved and how that will be meaningful to you and your community. 

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Submissions are due 5pm Friday 30 September 2026.

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NOTE: MBIE's consultation processes mean they need to check with you before they publish your submission. You could avoid a follow up email by letting them know the answers to the following questions:

• Can MBIE publish your submission on their website? Yes/No
• Can MBIE publish your name and any information about you provided in the submission? Yes/No
• Is there any thing confidential in the submission that you would like MBIE to remove before publishing? Yes/No (if yes, provide a version with the confidential bit removed, so MBIE don't email you to ask for it)

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What can you do?

• You can make a submission to MBIE’s consultation by emailing your view to ElectrifyNZ@mbie.govt.nz with ‘EDB efficiency consultation’ in the subject line by 5pm 30 September 2026. We have set out a few options below that you can use to help with your submission.
• Share this page on social and get more friends pushing for better outcomes.
• Keep up with the play: Follow Rewiring Aotearoa on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook for updates or subscribe to Rewiring Aotearoa’s newsletter.

What should you submit?

‍⚡ Got 90 seconds?

Copy and paste the following in an email to ElectrifyNZ@mbie.govt.nz with the Subject heading “EDB efficiency consultation”:

• I agree that EDBs need to be better regulated to deliver better outcomes for consumers.

• I support proposed additional powers across the board for the Commerce Commission, including to better regulate “consumer-owned” EDBs.

• I support additional key powers/requirements including: utilisation reporting, benchmarking, ability to require progress toward a defined target.

• I support strengthening accountability of the Commerce Commission to meet its statutory obligation to look after the long-term interests of consumers.

• I support Government fundamentally rethinking how it regulates the energy system to ensure the system maximises benefits to consumers, and New Zealand.

🐝 Got 5 minutes?

The above, but with a bit of your own thoughts. For example:

Why does this matter to you?  Overall affordability? Poor incentives for solar and self-consumption?

What energy future do you want to see? More localised resilience? Local abundance and sharing?

Your stories and your own words are what have previously had the most positive impact.

🐇 Got 15 minutes?

Jump into the discussion document and answer as many of the eighteen questions that you’d like! They love you to use the official form. 

Rewiring Aotearoa will share our full submission in the coming weeks, but encourage you to submit earlier.

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About Rewiring Aotearoa

Rewiring Aotearoa is a non-partisan non-profit organisation that believes electrification has major economic, social, climate and environmental benefits. We represent everyday New Zealanders in the energy system and advocate for an equitable energy transition that does not leave anyone behind. Our mission is to rapidly reduce New Zealand’s emissions, improve cost-of-living outcomes, and increase energy security and resilience by electrifying the millions of fossil fuel machines in our homes, communities, businesses and on-farm.

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