Kerre Woodham: High electricity prices are investing for the future

I thought we would start perhaps with power companies who appear to me making rapacious profits. Are they charging too much for electricity? Now the profits would suggest they are. 

The four big players —Contact, Genesis, Meridian, and Mercury—  made a combined 2.7 billion, with a 'B', billion dollars last year.

Historically high profits.

So surely that would suggest that they are rorting little old pensioners who are having to go to bed early in the depths of winter, because the aforementioned little old pensioners can't afford to heat their flats. Certainly Electric Kiwi chief Executive Luke Blincoe thinks the big four have excessive market power, but then you would if you're a little player in a big boy's game, wouldn't you? He told Heather du Plessis Allan last night that the market is broken, especially when Consumer New Zealand estimates that 40,000 households couldn't afford power, while the big four were making $7 million a day.

The Energy Retailers Association said the transition to a zero carbon economy means that power companies have to make a profit, as investing in new developments does not come cheap. They say that they're not lying on their profits like Scrooge McDuck covering themselves in money. They are plowing their earnings back into new initiatives like solar and wind farms that will ultimately lead to more affordable power prices for anybody. 

So is it as simple as saying that this is an example of paying it forward?

That we haven't really seen much of this generation. That's the way it used to work in this country. One generation would pay for infrastructure, so the next generation could benefit from the improvements and then they in turn would pay for the next lot of infrastructure.

It's all come to a screaming halt this time round. You can't really have it both ways can you? You can't have cheap power prices, and investment for the future. Somebody has to pay for it and that somebody is us. 

Do you see it that way? I mean you can see on the websites all of the different initiatives that they're investing in, and probably if you live near some of these developments you will see it for yourself. They're not lying when they're saying they're investing in new forms of energy.

It costs money and that's got to come from this generation because surely we've learnt one thing from this Government, you cannot keep borrowing money and printing money. Sometimes you actually have to suck it up and pay for it right here right now.

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