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Keep calm, and carry on posting.
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https://www.harmlesssolutions.co.nz/
I switched to Electric Kiwi Move Master after many years with Powershop around this time last year as the they came up cheapest in my 6-monthly comparison. However, after two hikes over the last 12 months (most recently in December) and coming into winter it was time for another comparison. Upshot, I've just switched over to Flick Off Peak.
Running the comparison, I worked out Flick will save me at least $100-$120/month. It will likely be more, as EK applies their Peak/Shoulder/Off Peak rates across all 7 days whereas Flick's off peak rate applies all weekend. There's a slight different in the peak timings (Flick stays in the morning peak 2 hours longer), but with the off peak rate then kicking in until 5pm instead of EK's shoulder rate it more than offsets the extra 2 hours.
Flick's daily rate is higher, but again the kWh savings more than offset this. With Flick, 71% of my consumption will fall into the cheapest off peak rate, compared to only 26% with EK (albeit another 4% $0 rated with their daily free hour of power).
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HarmLessSolutions:
What you're witnessing is the progression of the electricity utilies' 'death spiral' which has long been predicted internationally. The power retailers have no choice than to raise their charges by whatever means they think will work in order to finance the maintenance of their distribution infrastructure while electricity demand is eroded by increasing levels of self generation resulting from PV and battery storage adoption. These price increases in turn make distributed generation installations more economically viable by improving their ROI. Fixed daily charges are the best weapon they can muster in retaliation.
Add to that EV ownership which increases demand beyond what most PV systems are capable of supporting so their customers aren't able to disconnect from the grid altogether so rely on this as a supply 'safety net' which they still work towards minimising use of by way of storage batteries and TOU preferential charging, as V2H/G looms on the horizon and the electricity utilities are caught in a rock or hard place situation.
We indeed live in interesting times. Just be aware of the big picture to best advantage from the situation yourself.
There is not really any evidence of any decline in electricity generation NZ, rather we have been stuck in a fairly level pattern since around 2007. Increases in electricity use efficiency (i.e. the move from incandescent bulbs to fluro / LED lighting), and reduction in NZ industry has roughly been offset by increases in population and the move of more stuff to electric (i.e. fireplace replaced with heat pump).
The graph below is a few years behind the times, but the numbers for 2020 is 42,858, and 2021 is 43,267GWh, so the trend isn't broken.
If anything, the move from fossil fuels to electricity over the coming years will see an uptick in electricity consumption. Industrial heat alone would need us to double our generation capacity. Add the move of transport to electricity, and the move away from in residential / commercial gas use for space / water heating, cooking etc. Very unlikely growth in small scale solar will offset this.
On the increase in low user daily fee's, this is simply part due to the phase out of mandatory low daily fee low user pans. This policy was intended to benefit low income households, but it turns out that it was poorly targeted, and ended up largely benefiting other groups (People who spend a lot of time away from home / on holiday, those with small household sizes, those with modern homes, those with solar PV systems). This ends the cross subsidy from standard users to low users.
Fixed daily charges are hardly a weapon. Rather a reflection of the cost of having capacity available regardless of whether it is used. Grid tied solar systems do negligible to reduce demand at the peak time for residential use (Evenings in a bad weather mid winter cold snap. The sun is down, and it is likely that even solar customers with batteries will be drawing off the grid, unless their system is massively over sized for the rest of the year). Collecting money by a per kWh charge to cover fixed costs doesn't really work when customers are getting the bulk of their power form their solar system.
All the above is fine of course, but it is reasonable for, well all customers to pay a daily fee to cover the fixed costs of having electrical capacity allocated to them. Of course going off grid is always an option, but in general, a grid connection offers great value.
An argument could be made that NZ should join the long list of countries that have policies intending to subsidize / cross subsidize solar (feed in tariff's etc). However NZ has an unusually green grid, and is spoilt in terms of grid scale renewable resources that are often more economic that home solar. Personally think we should just be focusing on keeping power prices low (not working out so well atm), and greening out utility scale generation.
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AklBen:
@failedwof - Flick's pricing is quite good at the moment. EK's pricing is an absolute joke - I feel sorry for people who are sucked in by their marketing thinking they're getting a great deal.
EK were significantly competitive against Powershop (my incumbent at the time) and the big 5 (now big 4) when I churned in March last year. But two significant hikes have completely eroded that edge. So yeah, they sucked everyone in with their marketing and cheap rates then cranked them up pretty quickly.
The bigger joke is that in their last hike email they blamed "record prices for wholesale electricity and record profits for generators" when I can't see any evidence in the the Electricity Authority simple average and demand weighted average wholesale price per MWh data (viewable here https://www.emi.ea.govt.nz/Wholesale/Dashboards/VYBQKY?_si=db|VYBQKY,dri|1003,v|2) to support that claim over the preceeding 12 months (and even now in Q1 2023).
No care factor on the churn either, but so far I've never found "retention" to be a thing with any B2C provider in NZ. Just an email asking if I'm sure and a k, thanks, bye.
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