Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
Where is it legal to pay voters $350 just before an election, ask them to votefor you, and even publicly advertise the fact you’ve done that?
The sitting trustees appear to have done nothing to try to increase the turnout this time.
To be clear, it’s all legal. But if you ask me, democracy is challenged in this election. Also at stake: the size of your power bill, the security of our power supply and our ability to generate more renewable energy.
Entrust used to be called the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust (AECT) and it has a $2.76 billion asset: a 75.1% shareholding in the power company Vector.
Vector owns the lines used by Mercury Energy and other power companies to deliver electricity to Aucklanders, from Papakura north to the Waitematā and from Avondale to the Firth of Thames. That’s the old Auckland City, Manukau City and Papakura District.
If you’re paying a power bill in this area, you’re a Vector shareholder and every three years you get to vote for the five trustees. Voting papers will arrive this week.
The Entrust district follows the boundaries of the old Auckland City, Manukau City and Papakura District.
This year there are 12 candidates. Most belong to one of two very different tickets.
One is Communities and Residents (C&R), which has controlled the trust for its entire 30 years.
“People before politics” is the C&R slogan, but that’s a stretch. The group is closely aligned with the National Party: the candidates include two former MPs (Denise Lee and Paul Hutchison) and a former chairman of the party’s northern region (Alastair Bell).
As it happens, all is not happy at C&R. Just three months ago, seven-term trustee Michael Buczkowski resigned “for personal reasons” and he’s now standing against C&R as an independent.
The relationship between Entrust and Vector has been rocky in the past and this conflict suggests it is not smooth today.
But that’s not the main thing this election is about.
The other ticket is More for You, Better for Auckland (for short: Better). The candidates include two former Auckland councillors (Pippa Coom and Paul Young) and a former member of the Waka Kotahi board (Patrick Reynolds). And yep, some of them have connections to Labour and the Greens.
C&R is proud that Entrust pays a dividend to its customers, or “beneficiaries”. This is the $350 mentioned above and it arrived in our bank accounts three weeks ago.
It’s announced in a full-screen promotion when you open the Entrust website, which in turn is closely aligned with C&R’s own election campaign. The C&R billboards proclaim: “$350 Safe with C&R.”
“In this current cost of living crisis, having a windfall like the Entrust dividend will be welcome in so many households,” she said.
“Whether it helps to pay for essentials, or maybe a treat for the family, Entrust is pleased to be able to make a difference, no matter how small.”
What nice people. C&R says its other priorities include “maintaining lowest possible electricity prices and network reliability”, “investing in low-carbon electrification” and “strong corporate governance”.
Which is odd, because it’s hard to find evidence of great progress on any of these things. Let’s start by following the money.
In 2006, the year the current model began, the dividend was $310. Six years later it was $320, which in real terms, inflation adjusted, was worth only $262.
The value is still falling. This year the dividend was $350, the equivalent in 2006 dollars of $189.
If the 2006 dividend had kept up with inflation it would, according to the Reserve Bank online calculator, be worth $483 today.
It’s hard to imagine this sorry tale of decline would impress the shareholders of a normal company, especially if the board members bragged about it.
Better says there’s a better way. It wants to pay a higher dividend, reduce our power bills and increase the resilience of supply, with “a widespread rollout of solar and batteries”.
More for You, Better for Auckland candidates for the 2024 election: Patrick Reynolds (left), Jonaan McLeod, Emma McInnes, Pippa Coom and Paul Young.
Better draws on the work of research group Rewiring Aotearoa, which says solar is now so cheap it could reduce the cost of electricity, now as high as 34c/kWh, to as low as 6c/kWh.
Even if you added, say, 5.5% finance to buy and install the panels and batteries, that would still bring the price of solar up to only 12c/kWh.
Too complicated, too unreliable, too disruptive? We don’t need to take Better’s word for it.
In Australia, 35% of roofs now have solar panels on them. That statistic holds true even in Melbourne, which has about the same number of sunshine hours a year as Auckland. Here, it’s just 2%.
Or what about Germany, where the weather’s rubbish compared to here? Germans famously like to invent new words to describe new things and they now have “balkonkraftwerk”. That’s 550,000 solar panel arrays installed on apartment balconies in a single year.
The potential is enormous. A Monash University study in 2021 found solar power could provide three-quarters of central Melbourne’s needs.
Solar could be quickly scaled up in Auckland. One way is to offer customers loans to buy the equipment; another is for Entrust to retain ownership and recoup its costs by selling the excess power back to the grid.
The scheme could be used by sports clubs, churches, marae, schools and other community buildings.
It could be applied to those sprawling hectares of factory and warehouse roofs you see when you fly into the city. Over time, Better wants Entrust to partner with building owners to create a massive “virtual power station”, bigger than Huntly and any of the South Island hydro plants.
More power for the nation, hundreds of good new jobs, downwards pressure on grid power prices, greater resilience in storms, few consenting delays and no need for gas or coal imports.
And there would still be a decent dividend.
A similar scheme is being trialled by Kāinga Ora in Wellington.
Rooftop solar panels in Melbourne, Photo / Alana Holmberg, The New York Times
Why aren’t we doing lots of this already? Partly, because solar used to be less reliable and have high start-up costs, and the memory lingers. Partly because battery technology has changed the game.
Mainly, though, it’s because the big power companies have blocked progress, frightened of what cheap distributed solar generation will do to their prices and profits.
As Better says, over the last 10 years power bills have risen by an average of 3% a year, which means they double every 24 years – inside the time C&R has been in charge of Entrust. On current settings they are expected to double again by 2040.
An Australian report last month hints at another reason for slow progress with solar power. While a third of Melbourne homes have solar installed, it’s only 10-15% in the wealthy suburbs. Perhaps they don’t care.
Even though our bills keep rising, vested interests in politics and business keep telling us economic goals are not compatible with climate goals. There are so many ways in which that’s nonsense, and this is one of them.
Climate action is hard when it’s all down to individuals. But when civic leaders provide the right frameworks, regulations and financial incentives, it gets easy. It’s rare to have the chance to put that as rewardingly into place as in this Entrust election.
Speaking of rewards: this year those C&R trustees paid themselves $67,450 a year each, with more for the chair.
Two of them get to sit on the Vector board as well, where the base fee for a director is $107,000.
