She said VoLL was used to make investment decisions and not used to set power bills.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a proxy that we use to value how painful a power outage is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kai said it determined the impact of things like not having heating and refrigeration, as well as business and banking disruptions.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the Electricity Authority\u2019s general manager of wholesale and supply, Hayden Glass, said the figure was \u201cprimarily used for investment and reliability assessments, when deciding how and where to improve the electricity transmission network\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt helps with answering the question of whether a network improvement is worth doing, ie, whether it improves security of supply enough to justify its costs,\u201d Glass said.<\/p>\n
He said the VoLL was a \u201cblunt tool\u201d of measurement, as value could vary between residential consumers and businesses, time of day, and how long a blackout lasts.<\/p>\n
Glass added it was a way to put a dollar value on the electricity that people missed out on during a power outage: \u201cIt reflects the theoretical economic cost of losing supply rather than a payment to consumers.\u201d<\/p>\n
He acknowledged there were differences from when the amount was set to now: \u201cNew Zealand\u2019s economy, technology use and reliance on electricity have changed significantly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glass said the $20,000 figure was a very high-level estimate, and some had been using alternative estimates.<\/p>\n
\u201cTranspower has used an estimated VoLL of $25,000\/MWh for some of its work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Commerce Commission has the same $25,000 figure, updated in 2019.<\/p>\n
The Electricity Authority has previously suggested an up-to-date figure would strengthen regulatory decisions, investment, and market planning, and would also improve \u201ctransparency about the trade-offs involved when the electricity system faces scarcity or constrained supply\u201d.<\/p>\n
In 2023, the Electricity Authority\u2019s Market Development Advisory Group recommended an update to VoLL – it was reiterated in its review of the 2024 Northland pylon tower collapse.<\/p>\n
The work was deferred as the authority had to focus on delivering work related to the Government\u2019s Energy Competition Task Force.<\/p>\n
Azaria Howell is a multimedia reporter working from Parliament\u2019s press gallery. She joined NZME in 2022 and became a Newstalk ZB political reporter in late 2024, with a keen interest in public service agency reform and government spending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She said VoLL was used to make investment decisions and not used to set power bills. \u201cIt\u2019s a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[66038,1124,138,196909,4187,67275,10668,1686,54172,9058,2250,5342,112116,111,139,69,22507,10112,196908,14718,61,7188,3382],"class_list":{"0":"post-377965","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-66038","9":"tag-authority","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-conceding","12":"tag-cost","13":"tag-costings","14":"tag-economic","15":"tag-electricity","16":"tag-estimate","17":"tag-figure","18":"tag-longer","19":"tag-losses","20":"tag-measure","21":"tag-new-zealand","22":"tag-newzealand","23":"tag-nz","24":"tag-outages","25":"tag-power","26":"tag-poweroutage","27":"tag-purpose","28":"tag-to","29":"tag-uses","30":"tag-using"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}