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Aurora Energy’s CPP and enhanced information disclosure requirements
This page was updated8 days ago
Aurora Energy (Aurora) has been moved to a customised price-quality path (CPP) and has been required to publish enhanced information so that stakeholders, including consumers, and the Commission can see what it is doing to fix, upgrade, maintain and operate its electricity lines network.
On 31 March 2021, we announced a CPP that will allow Aurora to recover from consumers up to $563.4 million over five years towards this work. It also set the minimum level of reliability that consumers should expect to receive, measured by the number and length of power cuts that consumers are likely to experience across the network.
Without a CPP, Aurora’s network would have continued to deteriorate, safety incidents would increase, and its customers would experience more, longer, outages. The amount Aurora can recover for this work is less than Aurora asked for in its CPP application, but we believe it is sufficient to fund the investment needed to bring the network up to the standard consumers deserve, while ensuring they face lower bill increases than originally proposed by Aurora.
Because we recognised that the scale of increases was still significant and could cause financial difficulties for consumers, we smoothed the impact of this over time to lessen the immediate effect. This included capping Aurora’s annual revenue increases at approximately 10% per year.
The CPP provides for a level of accountability, and the additional information disclosure requirements we announced on 31 August 2021 will provide additional information to enable Aurora’s consumers and other stakeholders, and the Commission, to assess how Aurora is performing and whether it is doing what it said it will do under its CPP. These requirements are in addition to the standard information disclosure requirements for all electricity distribution businesses (EDBs).
A summary of the information that consumers and other stakeholders can expect to see from Aurora and when is in this infographic. We are monitoring how Aurora is performing under its CPP. Our analysis and summary of Aurora’s performance in the first two years of the CPP is available here. Aurora was also required to publish independent expert reports mid-way through the CPP period to evaluate Aurora’s progress. In March 2024, Aurora published the expert reports by Energy Networks Consulting and Farrierswier on its website. In May 2024, we published an open letter commenting on Aurora’s mid-period performance under its CPP. This open letter can be found here.
All documents related to Aurora’s CPP and enhanced information disclosure requirements, including those related to the full consultation process leading up to final decisions, are available below by clicking on the 'Documents’ tab.
Aurora have made an application for a Capacity Event Reopener. We considered this application and published our draft decision on 24 October 2024. Submissions on our draft decision closed on Thursday 7 November. We expect to make a final decision in December 2024.
About Aurora
Aurora Energy owns and operates the poles, lines and other equipment that distribute electricity from Transpower’s national grid to 90,000 homes, farms and businesses in Dunedin, Central Otago and Queenstown Lakes. Aurora is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dunedin City Holdings Limited, owned by Dunedin City Council. Aurora’s charges are built into power bills and are something its consumers are required to pay no matter which power company they are with.
Contact us
If you have any feedback related to Aurora’s performance under its CPP or its delivery of information disclosure requirements, or would otherwise like to get in contact with us, please email us at regulation.branch@comcom.govt.nz
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