Halswell, your home could be part of New Zealand’s power future
What these numbers assume
Thirty percent of your consumption falls in peak periods and seventy percent outside them - conservative for a typical household; if you already shift load overnight, your real exposure is lower than shown. The battery is a 15 kWh Fever-1 cycling once a day at 90% round-trip efficiency, using 13.5 kWh of its capacity. It discharges into your most expensive half-hours and recharges in the cheapest, and the model charges you for the round-trip losses. It does not assume you export at peak, and it does not assume perfect foresight - both would improve the numbers, and we have left them out. Network delivery, metering and the Electricity Authority levy are excluded: they are real costs and they are on your bill, but they do not change between scenarios. Neither stress scenario is a forecast. Both are chosen because they are severe enough to be uncomfortable and plausible enough to have happened before in some form.
No price is guaranteed
Wholesale prices are set every 30 minutes and spikes are not capped. Any figure shown here is an illustration using the assumptions stated on this page; it is not a forecast and not a limit on what you could be charged. Wholesale pricing suits households that can absorb a bill that varies materially month to month, and it does not suit everyone.
The question to ask yourself
Could you absorb the worst figure in the row that matches your usage, without it causing real difficulty? If the honest answer is no, wholesale pricing is the wrong product for you and we would rather say so now than in July. Powerswitch, run by Consumer NZ, and Billy, run by the Electricity Authority, are both free and both independent, and for a lot of households one of their answers will be better than ours.
All figures on this page include GST.
Not in Halswell?
Halswell Flex only runs inside Orion's pilot area, and the EECA subsidy comes with it. If your home falls outside the boundary, there is still a way to get a battery without buying one.
On PowerHub's usual plans we own and maintain the battery and you subscribe to it, so there is nothing to buy up front. You still buy your power at the half-hourly wholesale price with our flat service fee of 2.3 cents a kilowatt-hour including GST, and the battery still carries you through the expensive hours of the day.
Send us your most recent power bill and we will model what that would have cost you over the last twelve months on your own usage - the months it would have gone your way, and the months it would not.