Electricity spot pricing

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#3269932 9-Aug-2024 15:40

We paid Genesis $339 for 1234 kWh over 28 days which they said included a change in rate. You can bet the rate change wasn’t downward. Last month was a little more for 30 days.

They say we use 30% more than the average house in our street! How can that be? The house is freezing except for the living area where heat pump is on all day. We turn the other heat pump on for a few hours in the bedrooms at night then turn off when sleeping.

Will shop around as soon as the contract ends. I especially liked their new helpful tip, close the door when heating.

Jase2985

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#3269937 9-Aug-2024 15:50

Eva888:

We paid Genesis $339 for 1234 kWh over 28 days which they said included a change in rate. You can bet the rate change wasn’t downward. Last month was a little more for 30 days.

They say we use 30% more than the average house in our street! How can that be? The house is freezing except for the living area where heat pump is on all day. We turn the other heat pump on for a few hours in the bedrooms at night then turn off when sleeping.

Will shop around as soon as the contract ends. I especially liked their new helpful tip, close the door when heating.

We used pretty much the same amount of power (1260kWh) and it was about $60 cheaper($280), have you looked into a different provider?

Eva888

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#3269942 9-Aug-2024 16:03

Who is your provider Jase? This is in Wellington so not sure if that makes a difference. Have to wait until the contract runs out before I can move although if the difference is enough it may be worth breaking it.

PolicyGuy

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#3269955 9-Aug-2024 17:00

Eva888:

We paid Genesis $339 for 1234 kWh over 28 days which they said included a change in rate. You can bet the rate change wasn’t downward. Last month was a little more for 30 days.
They say we use 30% more than the average house in our street! How can that be? The house is freezing except for the living area where heat pump is on all day. We turn the other heat pump on for a few hours in the bedrooms at night then turn off when sleeping.

Will shop around as soon as the contract ends. I especially liked their new helpful tip, close the door when heating.

The average household in NZ uses about 7,000 - 8,000 kWh per year.
If you continue at your last two months' consumption rate, you'll use more than twice as much as the average.

Do you have a hot water leak that's dribbling away kWh & kWh under the house - when I worked for a power company decades ago the first question for a high power bill complaint was always "Has a plumber checked your hot water for leaks?"

Eva888

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#3269971 9-Aug-2024 17:53

Two cylinders are both reasonably new, one a year old and the other maybe 4 yrs, but will ask the plumber next time to check if there are any leaks. Nothing obvious has shown with a cursory look. The bills are high in winter because of heating but they do go down in summer. What alerted me was them saying we were 30% higher than others in the street.

DjShadow

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#3269978 9-Aug-2024 18:40

Just had a survey from Genesis Energy which mostly asked about what our thoughts were on installing both Solar and Battery, one idea they tabled was letting the retailer (in this case Genesis) have control over the battery so in cases of high load (high spot prices too?) they could command the battery to sell power back to the grid

Scott3

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#3269980 9-Aug-2024 18:51

Eva888:

We paid Genesis $339 for 1234 kWh over 28 days which they said included a change in rate. You can bet the rate change wasn’t downward. Last month was a little more for 30 days.

They say we use 30% more than the average house in our street! How can that be? The house is freezing except for the living area where heat pump is on all day. We turn the other heat pump on for a few hours in the bedrooms at night then turn off when sleeping.

Will shop around as soon as the contract ends. I especially liked their new helpful tip, close the door when heating.

"How can that be?"

Be a little carful comparing against averages.

~25% of NZ has gas heated hot water, Just under half have gas cooking. A significant number of households wood / coal burners for heating.

A decent chunk of Households have nobody at home during the day.

A decent chunk of NZ is in energy poverty, and can't / don't heat their homes.

Some houses are vacant (Holiday home, owners away on holiday, between occupants etc)

Some homes are tiny apartments.

If you have an all electric house, and passably heat it, don't think 1234 kWh is unreasonable.

If that heat pump during the day draws an average of 1 kW for 12 hours a day over 28 days, that's 366 kWh of power on that alone.

We used 1671 kWh on our last bill (28 days). Electric Cooking & hot water, 5x heat pumps 1x EV, Clothes dryer for every load, working from home most of the time etc, and we don't really hold back... We are on some cheap fixed rate deal from 2 years ago, not possible to get these rates anymore.

I'm guessing with wholesale rates running at ~80c / kWh, retailers aren't running any signup specials at right now.

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Ge0rge

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#3269981 9-Aug-2024 18:56

DjShadow:

Just had a survey from Genesis Energy which mostly asked about what our thoughts were on installing both Solar and Battery, one idea they tabled was letting the retailer (in this case Genesis) have control over the battery so in cases of high load (high spot prices too?) they could command the battery to sell power back to the grid

I seem to recall that is what SolarZero do already - think I remember reading about it the last time we had shortages a few months ago and everyone was asked to use less power one morning. I also seem to recall that you get no money back from that either.

I feel like I would want total control over my battery - some always left in case of a power outage etc. While I understand that you don't own anything with SolarZero, I'd be pretty miffed if the battery at my place had been used to make them some coin and then had nothing left when I needed it.

jrdobbs

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#3269990 9-Aug-2024 19:56

Eva888:

We paid Genesis $339 for 1234 kWh over 28 days which they said included a change in rate. You can bet the rate change wasn’t downward. Last month was a little more for 30 days.

They say we use 30% more than the average house in our street! How can that be? The house is freezing except for the living area where heat pump is on all day. We turn the other heat pump on for a few hours in the bedrooms at night then turn off when sleeping.

Will shop around as soon as the contract ends. I especially liked their new helpful tip, close the door when heating.

Have you logged into your account and looked at the usage?

You can drill down to the hour to see what your using. At least you can see what hours during the day are the high usage times.

msukiwi

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#3270008 9-Aug-2024 20:15

I think em6 has (had) a problem...... my lights are still on, but......

Yes I did refresh and wait a while and refresh the page.

Showing NO Generation......hmmm.....lights are still on....... perpetual electricity here? 🙃

wellygary

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#3270018 9-Aug-2024 21:03

Seems to be fine now,

Its now clear why the prices have gone nuts... Contract have been running their Diesel Peaker at Whitinaki since 3 August,

Its expensive, and therefore it is setting the parice across the whole of the generation stack,

Its even running off peak, (9pm on Friday Night), so its totally screwing the scrum.... spot prices are north of $700/MWh nationally, over $800 in the Sth Island

Bluntj

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#3270023 9-Aug-2024 21:42

tehgerbil:

I'm a really pessimistic guy, from what I see - Unless you're a shareholder, electricity as a service is being increasingly used as a cash cow by greedy people who give zero mind to who they're hurting.

Change my mind?

I mean, here's a pile of barely coherent thoughts and sources for this:

National sells off energy companies.
Labour handed them a cash bonus by forcing removal of prompt payment discounts.
Successive Governments have kept shelling out cash with the winter energy payment benefit.
Energy companies keep hiking prices, increasing earnings to $7 million a day.

Energy prices from EA:
https://www.ea.govt.nz/news/eye-on-electricity/new-zealands-electricity-future-generation-and-future-prices/

Coupled with:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/132841291/big-four-power-companies-earning-7-million-every-day

And the biggest F-you to consumers:
http://www.dividendsranking.com/New+Zealand-dividend-stocks.html
How and why are energy companies paying higher dividends than freaking gambling companies, logistics and healthcare!?

And Labours freaking meddling in 2019 just caused companies to raise their prices with impunity.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/10/government-s-threat-to-power-companies-end-prompt-payment-discounts-or-we-will.html
Power prices jumped 20% immediately for many. (yes lowered for some).
Funnily enough it was meant to save 45million dollars a year but I can't find any follow up assessment whatsoever so can only presume it would have been bad press and the call to remove PPDs utterly backfired???

So..
..Power companies are in the 3/10 highest dividend payers..
..The Government is propping up prices with the Winter energy payment benefit..
Companies who sell energy are going broke.
Companies who generate and sell energy are making money hand over fist.
Generating companies are caught red handed dumping water to raise prices and are not punished in any way.

The rot is systemic and deep.

Anyway, hopefully you've learn something. I know the dividend payout graph by companies was pretty eye opening and aggravating.

Make it rain more over the South Island catchments or find some more gas as we are running out of pressure for generation. No politics involved, just short of capacity.

alasta

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#3270100 10-Aug-2024 08:06

Scott3:

"How can that be?"

Be a little carful comparing against averages.

~25% of NZ has gas heated hot water, Just under half have gas cooking. A significant number of households wood / coal burners for heating.

A decent chunk of Households have nobody at home during the day.

A decent chunk of NZ is in energy poverty, and can't / don't heat their homes.

Some houses are vacant (Holiday home, owners away on holiday, between occupants etc)

Some homes are tiny apartments.

This. I live alone in a small unit, am rarely home, and use gas for heating, hot water and the stovetop. My annual electricity usage is about 1500kwh per year and Genesis are stating the bleeding obvious that I'm using '72% less than similar homes'. Unfortunately this means that I'm going to get smashed with the phase out of the low usage plans.

In regards to detecting hot water leakage and other such defects, I'd recommend reading your meter before and after going on holiday. If you can assess your usage when you're home versus when you're not then that will help you start to drill down on your consumption.

JimmyH

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#3270161 10-Aug-2024 09:29

tehgerbil:

And the biggest F-you to consumers:
http://www.dividendsranking.com/New+Zealand-dividend-stocks.html
How and why are energy companies paying higher dividends than freaking gambling companies, logistics and healthcare!?

Electricity companies may or may not be maxing monopolistic profits, but that chart doesn't tell you anything whatsoever about whether that's the case. It's the percentage dividend yield of companies - their dividend (grossed up for imputation credits) divided by the share price. Companies don't set their dividend yield, they can't set their dividend yield, the market does that.

Imagine there's a company, call it 'X Corp', which is a perfectly normal company growing carrots. The board of 'X Corp' looks at its profits, balance sheet and investment opportunities that might need cash, and decides that it will pay $10 million out in dividends that year. It has (say) 100 million shares on issue, so that dividend works out to be 10 cents per share. If X Corps shares are trading at $4.00 then it's dividend yield is 2.5%.

Then NIWA puts out a long term weather report which predicts that El Nino means that conditions are likely to be terrible for growing carrots over the five years. Investors panic, and the share price of X Corp falls to $1.50. Which means that it's dividend yield (on a 10 cent payout) is now 6.67%. X Corp hasn't sent a big 'F-You' to consumers, all that has happened is that market sentiment has set its share price at a certain level relative to dividend.

Then six months later NIWA puts out a revised forecast which predicts that actually the long term weather forecast looks fantastic for growing carrots. Investors pile into X Corp, and its share price soars to $8. It's dividend yield falls to 1.25% (again on the same current profitability and dividend payout of 10 cents).

So the dividend yield has ranged between 1.25% and 6.67% - and none of this tells you anything about X Corps ethics, business practices or much of anything else at all. It just tells you about changing market sentiment towards X Corp.

Typically mature companies with limited growth prospects (like utilities) have higher dividend yields than companies in sectors where future growth prospects are strong and market sentiment is "frothy". NZ's gentailers are mature utilities with limited growth prospects. Which explains why investors price their shares at a level where the dividend yield is relatively good - they are treated as income, not growth, sticks.

cddt

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#3270168 10-Aug-2024 09:53

https://www.interest.co.nz/economy/129137/new-zealand%E2%80%99s-electricity-market-faces-scrutiny-high-prices-prompt-calls-government

This guy agrees with me...

Dry winters and limited gas supplies should not come as a surprise to an electricity sector that has long known about the need to scale up renewable generation capacity.

Despite this, new projects have been slow to be built. This may be because the sector is incentivised to build only just enough electricity supply to meet demand and not more.

Each new unit of generation added to the grid reduces the price paid for every other unit already in the market. Energy companies with large amounts of generation capacity do not want to oversupply the market and drive down prices.

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