Abundant and Affordable Electricity

Cheaper power puts more money in your pocket and gives businesses room to grow. New Zealand needs much more electricity, and people are ready to invest their own money in producing it.

Building and connecting new generation has been made unnecessarily difficult and slow. Households putting solar panels on their roofs face barriers to selling the power they make. Around a quarter of a typical power bill goes to a local lines monopoly you cannot switch away from.

ACT has already secured the repeal of Labour’s oil and gas ban. We need to lock Labour out and unlock New Zealand’s potential by backing the people ready to build more power.

Read our full policy, Stability, investment, affordability: The keys to abundant electricity, here.

ACT will:

• Let you choose who buys your power. Households could sell to a different provider from the one they buy electricity from, or through local businesses and community energy schemes, with proper metering, network charges and consumer protections.

• Lift unnecessary limits on your solar. Allow households to export more power where the network has room. Make lines companies explain and justify restrictions.

• Get new power connected faster. Let private investors build and operate their own transmission lines connected to the National Grid, meeting common technical and reliability standards. The generators and customers using those lines would pay through voluntary agreements.

• Let you shop around for a connection. Open eligible work on new or upgraded connections to competing accredited contractors. Lines companies would still set the safety and technical standards.

• Make lines companies prove an upgrade is worth it. Require them to test major upgrades against competing options, such as batteries or ways to reduce demand at peak times, before putting the cost on your bill.

• Keep investment in more power coming. Oppose forced break-ups of the major companies that generate and sell electricity. Strengthen enforcement when companies misuse market power to shut out competitors or block fair access to electricity markets and infrastructure.

In our team’s words:

ACT Energy and Resources Spokesperson Simon Court says:

“New Zealand became a prosperous country in part because we were blessed with abundant energy. But you cannot maintain a first-world standard of living without reliable, affordable power. When energy becomes scarce and expensive, households feel it in their power bills, businesses face higher costs, investment becomes harder, and ultimately New Zealanders’ standard of living suffers.

“The answer is not for politicians to go looking for successful businesses to blame or promising to pull the electricity market apart. We’ve seen that before with the oil and gas ban. We need to make it easier for people to invest, generate more electricity, build the networks needed to move it, and compete for customers. That is how New Zealand gets abundant electricity and lower costs.”