Minister speaks on industry challenges

Minister of Energy and Resources Dr Megan Woods was interviewed at reasonable length on challenges facing the electricity distribution sector by Kathryn Ryan of Nine To Noon on Thursday 29 June.

This followed the interviewer hosting former ENA chief executive Graeme Peters on the show on 13 June. In that interview, Mr Peters warned of the level of investment needed to maintain the industry's infrastructure and enable a transition to a low-carbon economy.

Highlighted comments from the Minister include:

• …. we do need to keep investing in the infrastructure. We have a way of doing that at the moment, both in terms of transmission and distribution, but I don’t think that is adequate for the task that’s ahead of us …

• The job of the Commerce Commission is to ensure that [potentially lifting EDB funding caps] is fair and that a fair amount is being passed on to consumers. I think they are very interesting questions ...

• ... we can’t just lift the caps for ever and ever, and load more and more onto people’s power bills. I don’t think that is the answer either.

• I’d just like to confirm, no plans for a centralised organisation of our lines companies … but there is a lot that we can do to ensure that we are smoothing that out a bit, by making sure that we are getting people to work together …

• ... there are some incredibly talented people working in those lines companies, they’ve all got different and unique ownership structures – some of them are still in community ownership, some of them are privatised – but when I meet the people that are working in some of those companies, there is the greatest innovation that we are seeing in our whole sector. And it is not always where you thing it will be, in the big metros, either.