June 23 2020
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Forum slams power price plan u by Paul Campbell
A proposed increase in electricity prices in Northland under a user-pays regime has been slammed as damaging the economy and should be scrapped immediately before creating an “unfair financial burden,” says the Northland Mayoral Forum.
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p The Northland Mayoral Forum comprises (from left) Sheryl Mai, Whangarei District Council, Penny Smart, Northland Regional Council and John Carter, Far North and Dr Jason Smith, Kaipara District Councils
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“This change will drive up power prices for families, farmers, businesses, schools and healthcare facilities and is grossly unfair. The government should stop it in its tracks,” said Forum chair, Kaipara Mayor Jason Smith. The forum includes John Carter, Far North District Council, Sheryl Mai, Whangarei District Council and their Northland Regional Council equivalent, Chair Penny Smart. The price hike has been proposed in the Electricity Authority’s Transmission Pricing Methodology, TPM, that governs electricity reticulation and costs. The forum calls on the government to require the authority to consider the impact of its decisions on local communities like Northland, which are experiencing substantial energy poverty saying the TPM “will hit Northlanders
with something (they) simply cannot afford now or in the future.” “We are taking the fight against this injustice to the next level,” says Dr Smith. “If you look at the authority’s poor logic around user-pays, we should be charging people in Wellington and the South Island more for diesel and internet simply because Refining NZ and the Hawaiki Cable are here in Northland and those people are further away. “Under the proposal, the electricity pricing model is radically changed, and that is not the way the national grid was constructed. It was built for all New Zealanders to have equal and fair access to it. “We only have to look at the impacts on Northland from outages on the national grid year after year to see just how exposed Northland is. That’s why
we should not be forced into a userpays model. “That is completely unacceptable. Large pockets of Northland are deprived and poor, and energy poverty is very real. It is a major problem and people are already struggling to survive financially, particularly on the back of Covid and the severe drought we have experienced. Heaping more economic stress on people could have dire impacts on wellbeing,” says Dr Smith. “We simply don’t see how the government can find the proposal remotely acceptable or fair when it goes completely against the 2019 Wellbeing Budget.” The current Transmission Pricing Methodology can be found online in Schedule 12.4 of the Electricity Industry Participation Code. ¢
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