Transcript: The Future Of Our Electricity Network - Consume This podcast

Jon Duffy: Hi, and welcome to Consume This with me, Jon Duffy. This episode is part two of our examination of the electricity industry. It's not essential that you've listened to the previous episode entitled "The Bradford Reforms 25 Years On", but I would recommend it first. It's really good.

One thing that I took from that episode is that we might be at another inflection point where reform could be a possibility. According to former Prime Minister Dame Jenny Shipley, the reforms in the eighties were driven by a reevaluation of the role of government and some pressing financial concerns.

Jenny Shipley: We weren't earning enough. We got into debt as a nation heavily into debt. The World Bank was over our shoulder, and you don't sit there and do nothing.

So the reform environment then is different to the reform demand now. I think that we are sitting in an entirely new spot, but it's going to require a massive response.

Jon Duffy: And she's right. The reform environment is different now. We are increasingly relying on electricity to power our economy and dig us out of our climate change hole. And it's not just here at Consumer NZ where we see the need for change to the system.

Jenny Shipley: You know, this is a big economic question that laid over the public and private sector is going to be a huge debate. Whoever is in government in the next five to 10 years.

Jon Duffy: And whilst our net zero 2050 target is gonna have a huge impact on our electricity market, the technology available to us has changed a lot in the last 25 years.

David Reeve: I mentioned this to our energy practice principle, and it, it's something that previously we'd said with pride is, you know, the market model that we put in in 1996 is still the core of the market today. And my practice leader said, "oh, that's terrible. It tells me we've had no innovation and. 30 years. Surely the technology's improved since then."

And I was like, oh shit, he's right. There probably is better technology that we could be deploying.

Jon Duffy: That's electricity industry consultant, Dave Reeve speaking to us in the Consume This studio.

For the most part, we take electricity for granted, but this stuff is important. The market needs to function well and be set up to deliver low cost renewable energy to our homes and businesses. As my colleague, the manager of Power Switch, an all-round electricity guru Paul Fuge said in the previous episode...

Paul Fuge: It's the lifeblood of the nation.

Jon Duffy: And so to try and address where we go to from here, what changes we should make now for the next 25 years I got him back into the studio.

Paul Fuge: Kia ora.

Jon Duffy: So we picked up where we left off at the end of our last episode. That is 25 years ago we undertook a huge structural reform of the electricity industry. And the conclusion we came to was that actually no one really knows if they've been beneficial for consumers or not.

But Paul was clear from his perspective, and you know, that's the perspective of a man who spends all day at Powerswitch trying to get people the best deals possible, that retail competition hasn't really materialised in the way people wanted it to.

Paul Fuge: Well, that's right. I think they envisaged retail would be like, you know, buying any other product that people would switch willy-nilly between retail providers according to price.

Jon Duffy: And price is the main driver there. Right? Because actually we're just talking about a pretty homogenous product. It's just electrons, right?

Paul Fuge: Exactly. It's a different product from other products in that it's exactly the same. For it to work it has to be exactly the same. So there's no differentiation between different providers of that product other than the way they kind of provide customer service. Or they might have an app or you know, they have different branding.

Jon Duffy: Right. So with that in mind, what are the characteristics of the type of retail competition that we have now? How has it manifested?

Paul Fuge: So, at the moment, you know, you've got 30 different retail brands operating in New Zealand, but it's really concentrated.

You've got around 85% of the New Zealand market, with the top four retailers or one of their subsidiaries. Really consumers, although they have a lot of choice, aren't really using that choice. And that's because a lot of the retail hasn't developed in the way they envisaged it would.

Jon Duffy: Although not everyone we spoke to agreed with Paul on that. Two of the main architects of the reform, Jenny Shipley and former energy Minister Max Bradford, they disagree.

Max Bradford: I mean, you've gotta ask yourself the question, how do you measure that? Now most electricity consumers look at the price and complain about that, or more importantly, the cost of electricity, which for them is a function of price and how much power they use.

And they tend to get these things mixed up or don't take enough notice of them. But in broad terms, we've got a lower growth path in electricity prices, and that's really the test.

Jenny Shipley: I always try and weigh this up with how much consumers use the switching. And I'd be very interesting in the next 12 to 18 months as cost of living pressures come on people's households as to whether they really do have to go in and see where their cost centers are and think gosh.

You know, if things going well, we tend not to go worrying about the last dollar. Uh, when pressure is on, then you know your mortgage cost and your power cost and your telecommunications... Competition, which is available in the market, unless you've got an imperative to go and explore it or you're keen to do so, often you don't utilise the platforms.

So I think the competition in the market, or the competitive market is available to consumers. It's up to consumers to explore how to utilise that to their own advantage.

Jon Duffy: Jenny's view actually isn't a million miles away from Paul's. Throughout all of our conversations, he's been clear that switching and competition isn't really working in the retail sector, but he's ever optimistic that it could, if we'd all just get a bit more excited about our electricity suppliers.

But ultimately it doesn't just come down to us being more proactive. There's a larger structural issue that Paul is keen to highlight. Those four big retailers that he mentioned earlier are Contact, Meridian, Genesis, and Mercury. Collectively, they're known as the gentailers.

Paul Fuge: That's right. And that's a, that's a key point in all of this. New Zealand retail has two types of provider. There's the gentailers and then there's what you'd call the sort of more pure independent retailers.

So the gentailers are the ones that they own the power stations, and they also own retail. So they make the power, but they also sell it. The independent generators they don't own power stations. They just are basically a pure retailer. So they basically just sell electricity, and they're much smaller and they've really struggled to get a foothold in the market.

Jon Duffy: The interesting point here is that those smaller retailers buy their electricity wholesale from the gentailers and then compete with those same companies to sell it to you.

It seems fairly obvious to me that this has the potential to cause a lot of issues with the way the market functions.

Jenny Shipley: There was a discussion as to whether the gentailers should be generators and retailers or keep it separate. I remember that being discussed. But on balance, we decided that we would leave them able to be run.

I know that there's debate about whether it's fair or not, and I notice small players arguing that it should be broken up, but they should have thought about that when they set up their business model.

Max Bradford: I've got a a view that probably won't be popular with some of the retailers... but the one advantage of having integration between the generators and the retailers is that they can manage the vagaries of coping with supply shortages, demand shortages, much better than an individual retailer like Electric Kiwi or some of these other outfits who have been arguing for the split to occur.

Jon Duffy: But the best summary of why this vertical integration was allowed to exist comes from Dave Reeve and his colleague energy consultant, Steve Batstone.

David Reeve: When they looked at the potential risks and benefits of vertical integration, they decided to allow it because they did see that that was a way of ensuring that these integrated businesses had sufficient security and capital to invest in new plant. Which is still, which is still one of the reasons.

Steve Batstone: And cashflow

David Reeve: Yeah. And still one of the reasons why a number of studies into it have decided that you could be worse off breaking them up.

Steve Batstone: Yeah. And one of the factors, and I'm by no means saying this is the only factor was... Am I just launching a set of what are now called retail businesses that have very thin layer of assets.

I mean, they'll have some billing systems hopefully, and a call center, but it's not like the generation thing that's got a inherent value, that's gonna generate significant cash flow. Compare that to a retail business where you're just buying from a wholesale market and hopefully selling it to a customer at a bit of a margin.

The financial sustainability of those retailers.... you wouldn't wanna do all these reforms, launch all these retailers into a new competitive market and then see half of them go under. So allowing them to be bolted onto the side of generators that had the cash flow and and had this internal risk management hedging effect was a sensible thing to do.

Jon Duffy: And look, that does make sense. The optics around pushing through a load of reforms and creating a shiny new electricity market only to watch all of the new companies fail would be pretty bad. As it was, some of them did fail, for example, you can no longer buy your power from TransAlta. But as Paul mentioned earlier, new ones have sprung up to take their place.

Paul Fuge: But the key point is those small ones have always struggled and, and we believe they always will. As long as you've got that structure in place where you're competing against someone who produces what you are trying to compete against, that's always gonna be very difficult.

You can imagine if you apply that to other products, how difficult it would be, especially for a product which is essentially all the same. So when you combine that structural problem with general consumer apathy, you get some real problems with retail and consumers haven't been well served by that ultimately.

And that sort of to us, I think, indicates there's some real problems when the electricity retail market.

Jon Duffy: Mm-hmm. So if I can summarise where you're at... we're saying the bulk of consumers are still with one of those big four gentailers that were originally spun out of ECNZ with the exception of Contact, which had previously been spun out.

They're potentially paying too much at a retail level for their power. Retail competition's really not delivering the level of customer churn that was anticipated as customers hunt around for those good deals, and there's a combination of things there. There's the structural issues you mentioned and consumer behavior factors that are slotting into that.

Where does that leave us?

Paul Fuge: I think that competition has the potential to deliver for consumers. I think Max and Jenny were right, that competition does put pressure on prices. It does increase efficiency and it does drive innovation. It's just that we haven't enabled that to come through in electricity retail for the reasons we've discussed, but it doesn't mean we can't going forward.

So the promise, the potential of competition, if it could be unleashed, could actually deliver some really good results for consumers as was initially envisaged, but also we believe has environmental benefits as well.

And you know, it has other benefits. Like you can potentially reduce the, the need to build new power stations. It reduces the need to invest in new power lines. So there's a lot of potential benefits through competition if it could be realised as was envisaged.

Jon Duffy: Can you, can you tease that out? An example? As an example? Like how could increased retail competition negate the need to build more generation?

Paul Fuge: What we see with these new, smaller, independent retailers is they're more innovative. They have to be. They're hungrier and they're looking for ways to get more customers away, and so they're looking at new things.

So one of the things that they're particularly innovative around is offering different types of retail products around electricity. So it's not just about the price you pay, it's about also how you consume electricity. Things like time conditional pricing and you know, that has the potential to really save consumers money.

Jon Duffy: Can you explain kind of what that means?

Paul Fuge: So, time conditional pricing is where the price of electricity changes depending on when you consume it.

So if you look at, at how electricity works in New Zealand... during the day the demand for electricity increases and decreases according to what's going on. So you can imagine in the morning, early morning, there's not much going on the demand for electricity is lower, but then as people wake up and put the kettle on and start cooking breakfast, and then industry starts firing up and machines and lathes start turning over electricity increases.

So the power system has to be designed for that peak, the maximum amount of electricity. We have to design all our systems to meet that peak demand. So at peak demand we have, enough power stations available. All the power lines have to be sized to meet that peak demand, right? So as demand increases, that peak increases as well, right? So we have to build more power stations and more power lines to meet that ever increasing peak demand.

Now, if we could encourage people to consume electricity away from peak demand, that would reduce the need to build new power stations or at least defer it, and the need to upgrade lines in some cases. So that's a huge saving, right, because the power stations are very expensive to build and so are power lines. And not withstanding that, you know, no one really wants to have bigger power lines in their street or in, you know, in their neighborhood.

Jon Duffy: No one Paul?

Paul Fuge: Uh, well some people quite like power lines, uh, although I will admit we are in the minority, which is unfortunate.

Jon Duffy: Do you wanna do a little plug for being featured on the website Pylon of the month in June? June, was it?

Paul Fuge: I was July. I'm mister July. I was featured in the internationally acclaimed website, pylon of the Month. So yeah there are people who do appreciate electricity infrastructure.

It's unfortunate that some people don't like it. They see as a blight on the landscape, but they don't sort of appreciate that it is actually a visual representation of mankind's ability to work in harmony of nature. They don't see it as that kind of visual reminder of our ability to harness the forces of nature for good.

You know, 750,000 years after we've invented fire, we now can flick a switch and have instant light and heat, and people have forgotten that. The miracle of that. And that's, that's a great tragedy, I think. And that they don't appreciate that for what it is. I mean, someone showed me a picture of the pylons that run up the desert road.

Jon Duffy: Mm-hmm.

Paul Fuge: And they said that it's a shame they're on that side of the road cause they're sort of in the way the mountain. But, but they're probably built that way because back when they built them people wanted to see them. Cuz that was a visual representation that New Zealand was moving forward and we had this great technology that we were harnessing and, well, aren't we modern? And look at this great thing. So, to hide those things away probably didn't make sense to them. Today we try and hide those things away because people don't appreciate them.

You know, it was the same, if you go back to the windmills in Holland. When they started building those villagers would burn them down. They were seen as a blight on the landscape, and it wasn't till the Dutch painters started painting them in their landscapes, and they started appearing on postcards and stuff that now they're kind of sacred. You, you can't, you can't touch those things now. So until those kind of pylons and infrastructure start appearing in our art and, and people start appreciating them and for what they are, I don't think we are gonna, it's a mindset change we need to make.

(Laughter)

Paul Fuge: But anyway, so we need, we need, we need, we need what's true. Electricity is just wasted on people. They just, ungrateful. We shoulds. We should turn it off for a week and then just see how people, how people think about it.

Jon Duffy: As Paul carries on talking about his love of electricity infrastructure, he gets all misty eyed. You can almost hear his voice crack. But eventually after a quick detour to the Netherlands, I managed to wrangle him back on point.

Paul Fuge: Yeah. So you reduce the need to upgrade or you can defer the need

Jon Duffy: through time of use, plans?

Paul Fuge: Yeah, because it encourages people to shift and so the research we've been doing more recently shows it's a real thing that people's behavior will change if you put those incentives in front of them.

It will change quite considerably depending on the household. People will move their load off peak and that has environmental benefits. It reduces their power costs considerably. You know, 20 to 30% you can reduce your power cost by through these plans and it reduces the need to invest in infrastructure. So everyone's a winner out of those plans.

But the problem is those players offering those sorts of plans are still quite small. We believe if you open up retail more, you would see more of that sort of innovation going on.

Jon Duffy: Mm-hmm.

Paul Fuge: And you know, another big factor is electric vehicles, for example.

The big concern there with electric vehicles is it's great that we are electrifying our fleet. It's got enormous economic and environmental benefits for New Zealand. The problem is, is if everyone comes home at 5:00 PM peak time, and plugs the electric car in you can imagine that peak gets really outta control and we've gotta build even more power stations and more power lines.

So if you have a power plant that encourages people to plug the electric car in overnight when demand is low, then the people who own electric cars are getting cheaper electricity to charge their car. We're getting those benefits from moving that load away from peak. It's really important.

Jon Duffy: So this innovation, companies thinking up new and exciting ways to offer us power is a good thing. It's helping us to smooth out our power usage, ease demand on the national grid, and reduce the drain on our wallets. It's also something that Dame Jenny holds up as a success of the Bradford reforms and the current market structure.

Jenny Shipley: Companies see new initiatives coming and they genuinely do respond to them. They may not do it in a way that you would like, but I can tell you at the board tables of these companies, they're very aware of the trend movements and the projects and the promotions that the consumer sector and the electricity market, um, initiate.

Jon Duffy: As do our industry consultants, Dave and Steve.

Steve Batstone: I do wonder, for example, whether if you hadn't separated the retailers off and unleashed what was initially some chaotic competition, whether we would have the Electric Kiwis and the Octopuses and the Flicks today that are doing great things for customers, innovating and pushing the industry along. I don't think you would've had that. But that's not saying it's all all net beneficial, but I'm just saying that there's a big upside to that competition that it created.

Jon Duffy: But a really big question remains... If this all makes so much sense, why are we seeing these innovative time conditional plans offered by the smaller retail companies, but not the big gentailers?

Paul Fuge: I mean, one of the reasons is they don't need to. They've got this large consumer base that's sticking with them through thick and thin. Why would they move to change their offerings when they're not losing customers?

The other bit, that's more controversial... we talked about peaks before, that's also when the price of electricity is the highest. The way the New Zealand market works is the price of electricity change according, according to demand. So when there's lots of demand the price of electricity goes up, and when demand comes down the price of electricity comes down. That's how those retailers can offer lower prices at off peak times. Cause the price of electricity is actually lower during those times. But conversely, that's also when, and this is a bit controversial to say this, but this is how it's been explained to me by some industry players, is that at those peak times, that's when generators make the most money, right?

So they're kind of incentivised to have peaks in a way, or not mitigate those peaks because that's actually when they make their largest gains. So why would they encourage people not to consume electricity at peak times when that's when their generation arm is making the most money?!

So, you know, people will push back on that quite strongly. But it's a fact. That's how the market works, is they do make more money at at peak time.

Jon Duffy: There's a bit to unpack here because it's often energy that's more expensive to generate, that gets brought into service at peak times. But generally, it's true that the generators are making more money per unit of electricity when demand is high.

This means that the gentailers have very different incentives to the other retailers. If you're generating electricity, peaks are good for the bottom line. If you're just selling it, well, they're bad. They raise your wholesale cost and they eat into your margins.

The point about gentailers having different incentives to the rest of the retail market is also something that we discussed in the last episode, but I'd like to pick it up again.

Jenny Shipley: Different companies make rational market decisions about whether they'll pass on costs or whether they'll hold because of the competition in the market. It's not true that there's just a, oh, let's pass on costs. You want to hold your customers.

Jon Duffy: So the idea that a generator has a maximum amount of power that it can generate, it might have some large commercial contracts that it needs to satisfy, and therefore it wants a certain size customer base that doesn't exceed the maximum amount that it can generate so that it's not having to buy electricity off another generator.

Once that book is full, once it's got enough customers to meet what it can supply, it doesn't want anymore, so it'll stop competing to get new customers. Is that... am I understanding that correctly? Cause it's a little bit confusing.

Paul Fuge: I mean that, that's broadly true. The retailer generators will try and balance their book, so to speak.

They'll try and match what generation they've got and can purchase cheaply with how many customers they've got. And we see that through their acquisition strategy through Powerswitch. We can see retailers become active when they go into acquisition mode and they try and get a swathe of customers, and then they'll back off again when they've filled up their kind of book.

So we've seen that quite dramatically in some cases where retailers have come off Powerswitch in fact, when they've got too many customers because they're worried about getting more customers than can procure electricity for.

Jon Duffy: I mean that seems rational to me. But is that a structural flaw in the way this market's put together? When you've got an industry where large players will just step out and go, we're not competing for customers anymore because we are done.

Paul Fuge: Well, they never say that and they'll always take customers on, but it's more how aggressive and how active they are in that acquisition mode. And I think it does show a flaw in the market. I mean there's not many other markets where a retailer is scared to take on customers or scared to get too many customers. It indicates there's something structurally wrong there when a retailer is backing off because they're, they're worried about having too many customers being too successful. That's a very strange sort of paradox to have. And to me it does indicate there's something that needs to change if we are to realise for consumers the potential of competition.

Jon Duffy: Alright Paul, you're sometimes known as Paul Future around the office. Let's look ahead. What are the main things that we need to do to our electricity sector so that we have a stable supply for the future, we meet our climate change goals and consumers are paying a fair price for electricity? Go.

Paul Fuge: Well I think the time's come again to look at that assumption that to get investment in generation and to ensure security of supply, you have to have generation and retail combined.

It was more nuanced than that but basically that was the argument. That to ensure that you did get investment in generation and to ensure that you did have enough capacity, you did have to have these gentailers that had generation and retail. And that was the assumption made back then. They wanted competition, but they were really worried about security of supply, and security of supply trumps everything, you know, and then competition came second. It was recognised at the time that would create problems and it has.

We are not sure that's the same assumption you can make now.

It seems like a funny conclusion to come to that I also have to be able to sell it in order for it to be successful. All roads lead back to, if you're gonna have a proper functioning retail market, you need to separate the generation from the retail.

The other things that are happening at the moment, you know, we've got new technology coming in, which is really exciting. We're seeing a rapid uptake of solar in New Zealand and a rapid uptake of EVs. So if we get more innovation in retail, it will further accelerate uptake of those things. And that's because if you get different pricing plans, like we talked about, time of use. Time of use, can incentivise EV uptake, time of use can also incentivise solar uptake.

And the third thing I would mention there is data.

So New Zealand's invested a lot of money in metering technology. These are these new smart meters. New Zealand's a real success story that people might not know about in terms of the rollout of smart meters. We've got over 90% penetration now of smart meters in New Zealand. And what smart meters do is enables a whole lot of innovation in technology and electricity retail.

Jon Duffy: Smart meters are a really interesting part of the conversation. Our old dumb meters just recorded how much electricity you used. Your power company then billed you the same amount per unit. Smart meters know when you're using that power. That facilitates the time conditional plans and the pricing we talked about earlier.

When we spoke to Max Bradford and Jenny Shipley about their electricity reforms, their position was pretty much that everything they did was great. But they both agreed that more could have been done with smart metering and data.

Jenny Shipley: If I have any regret and max, I'm sure would elaborate on this, and it's a easy observation now... whether smart metering, so whether people having access to their own information and that information being available to the market independently. The technology wasn't quite there. I mean, the quality of smart metering when we use that word and it runs off our tongue now in the late nineties that. They were pretty basic.

Max Bradford: One of the questions that i'm often asked is - if you had your time over again, would you do anything differently?

My answer to that's really quite simple, not a lot. But there are some parts of the system which I think could have been improved. For example, the potential of smart metering. Which gives you the ability to control the demand side of electricity consumption has never really been picked up on a comprehensive basis.

And I think we kind of knew there was potential there for smart meters, which were pretty ordinary at that time. You know, it's a bit like cell phones. Well, everybody's got an iPhone now, but that sort of thing was unknown at the time. Same for smart meters. Going forward in New Zealand demand management is going to be an exceptionally important part of the ability of New Zealand to get the most out of renewables.

Jon Duffy: Demand management is something that's traditionally difficult for us as electricity consumers. If you think about an Uber ride, you can see when the price is surging and you might, well, you might decide to stay at the pub for another one until the price comes down. Smart meters open up that possibility for our electricity use. Possibilities like getting your electricity retailer to control when your hot water cylinder heats up, only heating up when demand and prices are low.

Jenny Shipley: Unless you give people the tools to be more efficient, then you're going to have to keep producing more and more without necessarily knowing how well it's used. We did some trials with Genesis where we supplied smart meters. We actually gave these families and the Wairarapa a lot of money. They bought solar panels and batteries and this and that, and did a quite sustained trial to see whether it would change their behavior, and it was very interesting and very variable. Some families became very focused on turning the washing machine on in the middle of the night and realising that they could bring their power bill down. And it was a novelty, but the company was not convinced that at this stage it was on a sustainable basis.

I think one of the things future going forward, is how do we create a culture where every household can not only benefit personally by using smart meters and knowledge and good actions, but whether you can effectively create another power station. By saving you are reallocating what's available.

Paul Fuge: That's exactly right. So at the moment I'm on a time of use plan and I have to remember to turn the dishwasher on after a certain time. I have to remember to put my electric car charger on at a certain time and if I forget, and I do sometimes, or you know, someone in my family doesn't, uh, can be bothered, that sort of goes by the wayside.

But if you can imagine if that was all automated

Jon Duffy: mm-hmm.

Paul Fuge: and that's where we're headed. That can be done for me and I wouldn't even notice, it's seamless. So what needs to happen there is, there's lots of rules around access to that data. Uh, and that's being looked at right now, but at the moment it's very hard to get that data.

So, Consumer runs Powerswitch, an electricity, and gas comparison service. Now, if we were able to access data there's so much more we could do in terms of offering consumers access and information around the cheapest electricity provider. But at the moment we're locked out from that data. So we are kind of relying on consumers to provide it to us. And of course they, they can't access access it themselves.

So we've invested in all this technology, but a bit like retail although we've invested in all this technology, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars, we haven't realised the potential of it because we've locked away.

Now, if we've got access that data we can tell you exactly what that means in terms of a cost saving. And what we know from our research is that's a really powerful motivator. When people can see they can save hundreds of dollars through those simple changes, they will act, and that will sort of increase the switching between providers and that drives competitive pressure.

Jon Duffy: So in summary, three big things: there's innovation, there's structural separation, and then there's smarter use of data. To drive competition effectively.

Paul Fuge: That's right. That's right. And that's where we're heading if we allow it. So at the moment, we are holding ourselves back a little bit.

Jon Duffy: But we could do most of this right now, couldn't we?

Paul Fuge: That's right. We are not looking into the future and imagining these things that could be invented. These are things that exist in the world now.

Jon Duffy: Mm-hmm.

Paul Fuge: These technologies exist. We can do this stuff right now if we wanted to. If we just tweak the rules a little bit, these things could start to happen right now.

Jon Duffy: All right. Hey Paul that was a fascinating walkthrough of what the future could look like for us, but actually really what it boils down to is what the right now could look like for us with just a little bit of effort from some regulators from the industry, and from players like Powerswitch. Paul Fuge: Yeah, that's, that's right.

I mean, we have a combination of excitement and frustration around this. We can see the potential. We can see great things for consumers. But then we have this frustration that it's tantalizingly close, but we are just kind of not quite able to realise it.

(🎶 Credits Music 🎶)

Jon Duffy: You've been listening to the Consumer NZ podcast Consume This. If you haven't already, make sure you hit follow or subscribe in your podcast app now. That way you'll always be the first to know when new episodes drop. Paul, you're our guest host today would you like to do some guest credits?

Paul Fuge: Sure Jon. Whilst we'll keep fighting the good fight, make sure you're on the best deal possible on your power plan by heading to Powerswitch.org.nz to check out whether you are on the cheapest plan.

I mean, electricity, it's all the same, right? So you may as well get the cheapest. Don't pay more than you need to. Come to powerswitch.org.nz and find the cheapest plan for you.

Jon Duffy: Yeah, that's right.

This episode was produced by Tom Riste-Smith and hosted by me, Jon Duffy. Thanks for listening. We'll be back very soon.