New challenger sparks up about Entrust’s Auckland power hegemony
Friday, 11 October 2024
Former NZTA board member Patrick Reynolds believes the conservative-aligned members of the group controlling Auckland’s power decisions for the past 30 years have done so little, they are either “incompetent, or have no interest in doing anything, or some combination of the two”.
Reynolds and four others are aiming to break the decades-long lock right-aligned members have on Entrust, the community electricity trust that owns 75.1% of Auckland lines company Vector on behalf of all Aucklanders.
The election for new Entrust trustees is taking place between now and October 25, and comes at a pivotal time for power issues in Auckland and the country, with a recognition that the current infrastructure will not cope with the expected upswing in population and need for mass electrification.
“The world is also a very different place from when [C&R] took control last century: the imperatives of the electricity market, as well as generation technologies, have completely changed, but C&R have kept Entrust standing still,” said Reynolds.
The high-profile Aucklander, a former member of the NZTA board who stepped aside with chairman Paul Reynolds in a then-new government clean-out of the agency in late 2023, told The Post he “failed to say ‘no’ quickly enough” when he was approached to try and challenge the incumbents at Entrust. However, the more he looked at the situation ‒ both the city’s power needs, and what he calls the “inaction” of Entrust ‒ he realised the need was “urgent”.
Communities and Residents or C&R have had a 30-year lock on Entrust and “have successfully reduced awareness of this community asset”, Reynolds said.
The C&R trustees have been appointed over and over for two reasons, he believes ‒ one, because they insist on only having a postal ballot, reducing the turnout (the last election saw just 9.5% of Aucklanders take part), and two, that they campaign heavily on ensuring the $350 dividend paid to some Aucklanders each year remains.
Indeed, the strapline for the current C&R campaign is “Keep the $350 dividend in your hands!”. C&R’s team for this year’s election includes four incumbents ‒ Alastair Bell, Paul Hutchison, Rachel Langton, and Denise Lee ‒ as well as newcomer Angus Ogilvie.
The C&R team oversaw a dividend worth almost $130 million paid out to more than 360,000 Aucklanders last month ‒ the highest total payout to date.
'Our focus remains on securing better deals for electricity users, and we have a petition in Parliament right now highlighting how 70% of our beneficiaries are over-taxed on their dividends,' said chairwoman Denise Lee.
Reynolds and co are not campaigning on dropping the dividend, but they believe it has declined in value in real terms over time anyhow, and is iniquitous: it is only paid to those in the Entrust voting area “so people on the shore and the West pay into this and don't get the dividend,” he says.
“It’s unevenly distributed on that basis alone but also in other ways ‒ if you have a big household in say South Auckland … Your power bill is many times bigger than your dividend and there is a real stress on your household with high power bills.”
Reynolds said that Entrust is not offering proper leadership of Vector through its majority stake, and has prevented the lines company taking a bolder direction in energy. He said there are those in Vector who are “champing at the bit” to examine new and different technologies that in other cities in the world have transformed power generation and distribution.
One of the methods he champions is distributed energy, which is electricity often generated by renewable energy sources near the point of use instead of centralised generation sources from power plants. For Auckland this could mean incentivising residents and other parties to install solar energy units that capture power in new battery technology, “taking the pressure off the need to invest so much in transmission and distribution infrastructure.”
It would also mean genuine competition to gentailers would emerge, he says.
“You and I and the factory down the road and the church on the corner, generating our own electricity, is real competition for the gentailer, as opposed to another generator who is trying to profit and is working the same market model,” he said.
As well as supporting the roll out of solar and batteries in homes, the campaign would also push for the roll out of solar and batteries on community centres, churches, and marae, along with large industrial buildings.
“This is the future – where every building is a power generator, has power storage, as well as being a power user. It is important for Auckland and Vector to get moving towards this future, or we will find our city and economy unable to compete, burdened with excessive cost.”
There are others who would like to see the C&R lock on Entrust broken as well. These include a new group called Re-Volt, led by competition analyst Tex Edwards, whose organisation is “calling for voters to use the ballot box to fix Entrust’s governance”.
Re-Volt says Vector and Entrust have “failed to benchmark the progress of adoption of new technologies to international best practise for peer group cities”, have “left voters misinformed of the true performance of this public enterprise”.
The group also says Vector has “failed to publish a vision statement on its targets for the adoption of new lower cost technologies; instead it is awaiting Commerce Commission guidance and has delayed capital expenditure”.