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Price of electricity, where does our tolerance level stop?

Attention The price of electricity, where does our tolerance level stop?

The Electricity Industry is overcharging the Domestic Consumer by $200 million per year.

Lines Company assets in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s doubled to a very inflated value.

Since then Domestic Consumers usage has been valued on these inflated figures.

To top this up, wholesale prices for electricity have shot up to almost three times the benchmark level, the price of electricity from new power stations.
This means that all retail electricity users will have another increase before very long and the Domestic

Consumer will once again be paying out more.

This will be enough to bring many Superannuitants and others on low fixed incomes to tears, as they try to dig deeper into an ever increasingly emptier pocket.

The new Electricity Authority will not only be pressured, ‘but will just have to’ place restraints on the generators’ ‘market power’ or see more people who have had their power cut off die next winter.

“The market” is the ‘system’ that sets our prices. I am reliably informed that prices could be set by regulation alone, or continue to be left completely to unregulated suppliers (who can profiteer without limit because electricity is essential).

In any civilised country "market prices" are subject to some regulation, but only in New Zealand is it subject to such "light-handed regulation" that the companies can make whatever profits they believe the Minister will tolerate.

Government's tolerance is getting pretty high, with electricity prices acting as a tax by another name.

ENDS

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