Graeme Weston

I support Horizon Networks. It’s ours – built and paid for by this community, and we need it to work well for the next 50 years.

That means being honest about something: the network needs a fair, sustainable revenue stream, and the regulatory model it currently operates under – cost recovery based on a regulated asset base and allowed rate of return added as line charges to our bills is designed for one-way power flowing from the network to the customer – it was never built for the system we’re moving into, where solar, batteries and flexible demand mean power increasingly flows both ways.

That’s not a criticism of Horizon Networks.

It’s an argument for helping it get paid properly for a different, more valuable job: not just building poles and wires but actively co-ordinating a two-way grid – becoming what the industry calls a distribution system operator.

The Kope zone-substation alternative solution work is a small, practical example of what that looks like in practice: instead of buying a new transformer, Horizon is testing whether local batteries, solar and flexible demand from consumers and community sites can do some of that job instead. Thus avoiding another charge on our bill.

That’s not consumers versus the network – it’s the two working as a team, which is exactly the model we should be backing.

That’s why MBIE’s current consultation on improving the efficiency of electricity distribution businesses matters so much.

It’s asking, at a national level, exactly the questions this region is already testing on the ground: how networks get paid, how a monopoly is held accountable, and how consumer-provided flexibility gets a fair shot alongside conventional investment. It closes on 30 September.

I’d genuinely like to see Trust Horizon (trustees elected by us to represent consumers) and Horizon Networks put in their own submissions. Between them they have a perspective few others in the country can offer – a network operator that is also directly, charitably accountable to the community it serves.

Their view on how to fund a two-way network fairly, and on what a modern distribution system operator role should look like here, would be genuinely useful for MBIE to hear, and I’d encourage anyone reading this with a connection to either organisation to ask them to put pen to paper before the end of the month.

Refer https://www.mbie.govt.nz/have-your-say/consultation-on-edb