{"id":607769,"date":"2026-09-22T03:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T03:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/607769\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T03:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T03:10:10","slug":"aotea-energy-launches-ae-1-battery-offering-wholesale-power-prices-to-homes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/607769\/","title":{"rendered":"Aotea Energy launches AE-1 battery offering wholesale power prices to homes"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a cost upfront.<\/p>\n

The AE-1, launching this month, comes in three flavours:<\/p>\n

A six-kilowatt (6kW) model ($10,500), aimed at \u201cstandard household loads (heat pumps, hot water, refrigeration)\u201dAn 8kW model ($11,500), which \u201cHandles heavy loads including EV chargers and induction cooktops\u201d; and A 10kW model ($12,500) \u201cfor large multi-appliance demand households\u201d<\/p>\n

The pricing substantially undercuts Tesla\u2019s Powerwall home battery, but Toki says he doesn\u2019t view it as a direct competitor, given Tesla doesn\u2019t have an electricity retailer licence so can\u2019t offer the same ability to arbitrage pricing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a one-off $1500 installation fee with no DIY option. The system has to be put in by a licensed electrician. <\/p>\n

\"AoteaAotea Energy founder and chief executive Tama Toki (left) with chief operating officer Antoine Riboulon with one of their firm’s AE-1 smart home batteries. Photo \/ Sylvie Whinray <\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s a $20 per month subscription fee for access to Aotea Energy\u2019s software, which lets you access power at wholesale pricing.<\/p>\n

Wholesale energy, network charges, metering and levies are passed through at cost. Buying an AE-1 battery involves leaving your existing power retailer and making Aotea Energy your new retailer. Each month it will send you a bill, which will be minus whatever you manage to sell to the grid.<\/p>\n

Barrier to success<\/p>\n

\u201cNecessity is the mother of invention,\u201d Toki (Ng\u0101ti Rehua, Ng\u0101puhi) says, who grew up on Great Barrier Island (the M\u0101ori name of the island is Aotea).<\/p>\n

With no centralised power, residents use (increasingly expensive to run) diesel generators or solar.<\/p>\n

In the case of Toki \u2013 who founded a skincare brand on the island \u2013 that meant experimenting with batteries, which led to him founding Aotea Energy in 2022, initially building prototype batteries and software for peer-to-peer sharing.<\/p>\n

\"AoteaAotea Energy’s app tracks the state of your battery, your power use, wholesale power prices and what you’re making and any profit from selling electricity back to the grid.<\/p>\n

He now has 18 staff, spread across offices in Auckland and Christchurch, including a high-powered hire: Antoine Riboulon, who serves as chief operating officer.<\/p>\n

Before an 18-month career break, which brought him to New Zealand, Riboulon spent five years working on energy products for Tesla in California and Texas, rising to global head of operations for Tesla Autobidder \u2013 the firm\u2019s energy trading and control system for its utility-scale batteries.<\/p>\n

\"TrackingTracking the state of play in Aotea’s app as wholesale prices fluctuate by the hour.<\/p>\n

Financial backing has come in the form of convertible notes (loans that can be converted to equity) in \u201cthe six figures\u201d from Sir Stephen Tindall\u2019s K1W1 and entrepreneur Vaughan Fergusson, the founder of point-of-sale software firm Vend (sold in 2021 to Nasdaq-listed Lightspeed Commerce for US$350 million).<\/p>\n

\"AoteaAotea Energy’s AE-1 Smart home batteries are finished in a marine-grade stainless-steel enclosure. Photo \/ Sylvie Whinray <\/p>\n

Aotea also received a loan from Crown clean energy innovation agency Ara Ake, whose $6m per year funding was axed in 2026.<\/p>\n

The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority is now administering Ara Ake\u2019s outstanding $5.5m in repayable grants \u2013 which were between $450,000 and $500,000 for most recipients, repayable once revenue hit $1.5m or there was a $10m or higher capital raise.<\/p>\n

A bracing environment, but less so than before<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the past 12 months, our whole fleet has paid an average of six cents per kilowatt hour across the full trading period. On average, that works out at about $2700 in savings a year, with a payback period of between three and six years,\u201d Toki said.<\/p>\n

The past year, with plentiful rain, has been a benign one for wholesale or \u201cspot\u201d power pricing, which actually fell in a number of regions. Power bill increases have been blamed on higher lines charges.<\/p>\n

Power retailer Flick Electric (now owned by Meridian) launched last decade with an app that allowed consumers to access wholesale power prices. <\/p>\n

Savings of $500 a year were promised for its spot price plan, but cold and dry winters in 2017 and 2018 saw spot price spikes. Some Flick consumers complained to media they were paying $100 more per week for sustained periods.<\/p>\n

Regular power plans have the cost of \u201chedging\u201d built-in, smoothing the impact when wholesale pricing spikes way above what retail consumers usually pay.<\/p>\n

\"AfterAfter finishing at Tesla in Texas, Antoine Riboulon travelled the world with his wife and daughters looking for a new place to live. They settled on Christchurch \u2013 Aotea Energy’s South Island base.<\/p>\n

Wholesale prices were also volatile in 2021 (when Flick stopped taking new customers for its spot price plan) and again in autumn 2024. <\/p>\n

Wholesale pricing is updated every half hour, making for a potentially intimidating environment, even with the help of user-friendly software on your phone.<\/p>\n

Toki says his firm has war-gamed how its system would fare during the spot price spikes of recent years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAugust 2024 was an extreme tail-risk event; a perfect storm of low hydro reserves, low wind, and thermal supply constraints,\u201d he told the Herald.<\/p>\n

During that month, wholesale spot prices averaged about $500 per megawatt-hour (MWh), compared with a standard baseline of around $125\/MWh, Toki said.<\/p>\n

\"TamaTama Toki (left) says his company chose a lithium phosphate battery because it’s the safest technology. Aotea has been buying batteries from one of China’s big three battery makers, EVE (the others are CATL and BYD). He regards the battery as a commodity, with Aotea putting its efforts into its custom electronics and electricity trading software. Also pictured is Aotea Energy chief operating officer Antoine Riboulon. Photo \/ Sylvie Whinray<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve used the August 2024 spot pricing event as a stress test for our model and compare our figures against that period whenever we generate a customer bill report,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the wholesale market fluctuates every 30 minutes, even during a high-priced month, the spot price rises and falls throughout the day.<\/p>\n

\u201cAE-1\u2019s software continuously hunts for the lowest available rates within those 30-minute windows, allowing the battery to charge at the cheapest relative intervals and run the home off stored energy during peak spikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile no retail model is completely immune to extended macro-pricing events, the AE-1 acts as a dynamic shock absorber against wholesale market exposure. <\/p>\n

\"AoteaAotea Energy backer Sir Stephen Tindall. Photo \/ Greg Bowker<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause these events are short-lived, the substantial savings generated across the rest of the year far outweigh a single difficult month, ensuring customers still come out well ahead on an annual basis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long-time Flick Electric chief executive Luke Blincoe has accused the big gentailers of trying to squeeze his company out. <\/p>\n

In 2023, he made a formal complaint to the Commerce Commission that Flick had been denied access to \u201cshaped\u201d hedge contracts that cover blocks of time, reducing the risk of huge half-hourly risks. It was rejected.<\/p>\n

Today, there are more protections for small retailers, however.<\/p>\n

The Electricity Authority\u2019s new \u201clevel playing field\u201d rules<\/a> for future hedging contracts came into force in July.<\/p>\n

The new measures require gentailers to offer hedge contracts to independent retailers on the same terms as they offer to their own retail businesses.<\/p>\n

They also allow the Electricity Authority to watch retail prices closely and monitor progress.<\/p>\n

This new regime is designed to improve competition and give retailers confidence they are not being discriminated against when purchasing wholesale electricity.<\/p>\n

Customer turned investor<\/p>\n

\u201cI had been looking into the whole solar, batteries, smart home space for a while. I had a coffee with Tama and shared his view on how to make the grid smarter by orchestrating it from network edge storage,\u201d Fergusson told the Herald.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe team had very early Vend vibes: Big goal, limited resources and a smart team who weren\u2019t afraid to give it a shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe desks in the [Auckland] office are mostly doors on trestles. I loved how the focus was on putting everything into making an amazing product,\u201d Fergusson said.<\/p>\n

Aotea Energy\u2019s Auckland office occupies the space used by American Magic for the 2020\/21 America\u2019s Cup. Fergusson strongly approved of the \u201cKiwi start-up life\u201d use of cinder blocks to prop up workbenches.<\/p>\n

\"VaughanVaughan Fergusson at the 2026 Hi-Tech Awards, where he was inducted into the Hi-Tech Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are rolling out AE batteries at our lodge in Raglan. We\u2019ll have a small fleet of them there linked into a solar project we are doing. The network there suffers from brownouts and cuts more frequently than we like, so we\u2019re hoping we can pump a bit of stability back into the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald\u2019s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a cost upfront. The AE-1, launching this month, comes in three flavours: A six-kilowatt (6kW) model ($10,500),…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[542,299534,120099,6081,138,23852,299535,1667,8276,1888,76389,13800,6800,115122,1739,111,139,69,19276,10112,12937,659,7811,2044,61,17575],"class_list":["post-607769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-access","tag-ae1","tag-aotea","tag-battery","tag-business","tag-consumers","tag-electrics","tag-energy","tag-experiment","tag-first","tag-flick","tag-giving","tag-homes","tag-illfated","tag-launches","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-offering","tag-power","tag-prices","tag-retailer","tag-since","tag-time","tag-to","tag-wholesale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607769","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=607769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}