When it comes to figuring out the costs of moving away from gas, who do you trust?

You could choose to trust the gas industry, which obviously wants to keep New Zealanders high on its supply.

Or you could choose to trust New Zealand households that have chosen to tell an independent organisation working hard to reduce customer energy bills and emissions how much money they’re saving by transitioning to fully electric homes.

Last week, the Gas Industry Company (GIC) released a report on the costs of switching to electricity. Our response was that it was misleading, it made incorrect efficiency comparisons, it used unrealistic assumptions for the uptake of technology like hot water heat pumps, and it completely failed to take account of solar and batteries.

As Casey said: “If you’re very pessimistic about the adoption of solar and batteries and hot water heat pumps, then you could probably draw a similar conclusion to what they’ve drawn. But when you look overseas and see what’s happening in Australia, I think there’s a degree of inevitability around large-scale adoption of efficient electric machines and the ability for us to generate and store electricity ourselves.”

We also questioned the disconnection costs the gas industry was quoting.

“This idea that it costs $2000 to disconnect gas – we know for a fact that it doesn’t take that. It takes probably a couple of hundred dollars. The gas industry wants to quote that price because it adds to the cost of moving off gas which of course makes their numbers look way better.”

The GIC is marking its own homework and cherrypicking numbers here. New Zealand homeowners - and decision makers - should be sprinkling these findings with plenty of salt.

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