Articles about Energy

In 2009 a visiting expert on commodity studies from Stanford University, Professor Frank A Wolak, opined that each year New Zealand’s electricity consumers were paying around $700 per household more than they should. This figure also applied to the tens of thousands of small businesses using small amounts of electricity. What followed was a studied silence from the industry. Government's Energy Price Review In April 2018 after years of consumer electricity prices continuing to rise at a rate far exceeding inflation, the Minister of Energy and Resources appointed Miriam R Dean...
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 [Electricity] Demand has, year on year, been steadily rising. This trend is likely to continue, so don’t look for much relief from higher electricity prices in the near term. I recently talked to a businessperson who had signed up to an electricity contract that had his company effectively speculating on the spot market. What the company didn’t realise (and wasn’t told) was that playing the electricity spot market was fraught with upside cost risk. In their case they are now paying more than three times the standard retail electricity rate for business, and facing significant...
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The following post was written by Bryan Leyland for KiwiBlog. Bryan is an engineer with over 60 years experience in the energy sector and regularly comments on various topics. He is a strong believer in a single payer market and Carl Hanson, former head of the Electricity Authority argues against this here. At Total Utilities, we track the competitiveness of contestable costs and been doing so for nearly 20 years. While this data is representative of our customer base (which is made up of small and large commercial and industrial customers and does not include residential customers) we...
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