I get that prices are up, and they increase their prices for Autumn, but their daily rate has gone up 33%. I'm so sick of this extortion. Where does anyone get a 33% increase? Seriously, wtf?
@rickt65 It doesn't benefit low users. As the fixed daily charge increases, the unit rate is supposed to decrease. As someone who works in the industry, I have not seen much evidence of the rates decreasing. I have seen fixed daily charges between $5.50 to $6.00, imagine paying that before you have used any electricity.
@hisdorkette88 Those very high daily charges are for high capacity connections or very remote houses - unfortunately that just reflects the cost for networks to serve those customers. The alternative is to have the rest of the population subsidise them which isn't really fair either.
As for the first point unfortunately that's not really possible to easily verify whether they would have gone up more had the daily rate not increased - given distribution networks have been hit pretty hard by inflation and costs associated with the impending electrification, it's likely per unit rates would have gone up even more had the daily rate not increased - networks are after all highly regulated and many are consumer owned trusts which obviously have no incentive to rip off customers.
@sahartech Aurora is entirely owned by the council - is there any reason to think it'd be run any better if it were directly managed by the council rather than running it as a publically owned corporation? Council management of 3 waters throughout the country hardly inspires confidence. Local government in NZ seems to nearly always fall beholden to short sighted ratepayers who are allergic to necessary infrastructure spending.
@moonlightdreamer Power companies make the majority of their profits from selling wholesale energy, so that's not really relevant to daily charges from retailers and networks.
@rickt65 The system used to benefit low users, but won't any longer.
The reasoning was a lot of high-usage households are actually quite poor, you can imagine all the multi-generational families who live in one house, per person they tend to be poorer than those who can afford to live in a more independent way (low users).
The old government noticed this, realised these households were effectively subsiding low-user households, the lower daily charge for low users meant a higher daily charge for high users when it's actually the same thing being paid for, a fixed daily standing charge just to be connected at all.
@moonlightdreamer If the increase in daily charges (so far) doubled your power bill, then your power bill was far below average.
I'm not saying you aren't suffering - you obviously are. I agree with the other commenter that targeted help makes more sense than one type of poor person subsidising a different type.
@ldssurvivor Yep a pensioner living in a council or social housing flat can afford to pay the same as a household with three families that have 7 adults all working.
@yorkiegal Given 7 adults would presumably use more power than a pensioner living alone, the latter case would still have a much higher power bill than the former, so I'm not sure what the point you're making here is.
If certain people need assistance paying their power bills, targeted assistance makes a lot more sense than the current low user system, which is poorly targeted as a lot of wealthy people were having their lines charges subsidized by poor people.
@rickt65 Depends entirely on where to live and what your network determines is their daily charge. For standard users (i.e. not low users which I assume you are) this varies by several dollars a day between networks.
@godisbigger Ours did that to us 2 years ago, we changed to Contact and now get free power between 9pm
and midnight every day with a higher daily charge of $2.334, and outside that time we pay 22.1c/KW. It dropped us by about $30-$50 a month, we just have to cook and wash in those 3 free hours everyday.
