Some Kiwis could be paid to save power on cold nights

Some Kiwis could soon be paid to save electricity during our coldest nights, in part, to help secure the country's power supply during periods of high demand.

Octopus Energy is offering eligible customers $2 for every kilowatt hour that is saved during some periods in winter.

Chief operating officer Margaret Cooney said they're doing everything they can to help keep the lights on. "Anything will help because we'll reward you for any reduction compared to what you'd normally do".

"We're hoping that you don't turn off the heaters, but shift those things that are a bit discretionary like putting on the dryer, or charging your EV to later in the evening".

Cooneys said her company's UK equivalent has done something similar, but believes it's the first time it's been tried in New Zealand.

Transpower's executive general manager of operations Chantelle Bramley supports the initiative.

"Consumers should absolutely benefit from the actions they take to help the power system".

It comes as winter arrives, which is when the sector really struggles, particularly during the coldest mornings and evenings.

May was particularly challenging for Transpower, with an unusual cold snap requiring the system operator to ask Kiwis to save power as there was a projected gap in supply.

"When we ask New Zealanders to conserve, it is a last resort, but we would rather call on their help than have people facing blackouts in the event that there is an issue on the power system," Bramley said.

1News was given a tour of Transpower's Wellington control centre which, along with another site in Hamilton, has the huge task of running the national grid.

Operations manager Dion Ahern said there's good forecasting of what's coming up, but such cold temperatures weren't expected before winter.

"So what happens is we try and keep a buffer of about 200 megawatts.... as that day progressed that margin, it dropped, that margin dipped below zero so essentially we had no margin. We were forecasting that the next morning we'd be short".

As a result of the public warning Kiwis turned off many appliances, saving the equivalent of Hamilton's average power use. If that hadn't happened and there was a shortage, power would have needed to be turned off to a small number of households.

The control centre gets information directly from MetService and another company that does modelling based on previous power use.

"Between the two control rooms, so Hamilton and Wellington here, we usually have a team of about four on shift," Ahern said.

Within the centre there's numerous screens giving up to date information about power use in the north and south islands. "If the temperature in Auckland went a degree cooler, you'd see that go up by around about 100 megawatts".

Bramley said a lot has changed since the 2021 incident where around 34,000 households lost power. "So we've introduced a lot more information, better wind forecasting, more industry briefings to provide more situational awareness of what's going on with the power system".

She thinks what will really help in future winters is more investment in infrastructure that can be started up quickly.

"So we need more investment in things like batteries and fast start peaking units would be ideal".

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