Is Auckland’s Entrust powerline undergrounding fair?
How Auckland’s Electricity Trust is rorting our powerline fees and spending it on the wealthiest suburbs.
Every time you pay your power bill you might not have noticed but you’re actually paying up to 36% in “power line fees”. These fees don’t actually go to your power company but instead go to the company that owns the powerlines that get electricity to your house -in Auckland that company is Vector. You can read more about how they calculate line fees here.
The good news is that in Auckland - Vector is mostly (75%) owned by us - the people! Which means that when Vector makes a profit from its line fees (and other operations) then the profits are meant to come back to us, via this trust group called “Entrust” (Note Entrust is only Auckland City and Manukau City- Not North Shore or West Auckland see the map here ). This is why in September your household might have received $303 via ‘The Entrust Dividend” - which is essentially the left over profit from Vector that gets passed on back to you as the “owners” of Entrust. So far so good. But there’s a catch.
It turns out that the people who have been running Entrust, despite sending you lots of money each year, aren’t actually that nice and are not giving Aucklanders a fair deal- at all. You can read more about their embarrassing in-fighting here, but more importantly these 5 people seem to be very clearly taking your lines fees and spending it in the wealthiest suburbs of Auckland. See below, this data comes from Vector’s own website which you can find here:
https://www.vector.co.nz/personal/electricity/undergrounding-other-projects
This is how inequality in our city happens. A fee that we all pay for a basic service is getting rorted to pay for the beautification of streets and suburbs for those in very exclusive areas. It will undoubtedly make the property in those areas even move valuable relative to the suburbs that are missing out. $10.5 million is spent every year by Entrust doing this. That is not $10.5 million that Vector is choosing to spend that is $10.5 million that the people on Entrust are directly diverting into the suburbs they prefer for political purposes.
When you see this in map form its even more outrageous.
So much of south and east Auckland is missing out on this powerline undergrounding programme. -and arguably these are the suburbs that need it most, suburbs that are exposed to extreme storms (like tornados in Papatoetoe )and weather events that easily take out power lines and cut of electricity to poorer households.
So what do you think, is this fair?
From the 14th of October till the 26th of October you have the chance to do something about this in the Entrust Elections. Your postal voting papers will come to the power bill payer in your household.
The “More for You, Better for Climate” Team will put fairness, professional governance and the climate transition opportunity at the heart of decision making for Entrust. You can find out more about our team here.
In the mean time, please share this article and spread the word about this unfairness to people you know within the Entrust Area.