New Zealand home energy storage power supply production

Supplying electricity to homes and businesses across New Zealand involves three key elements: generating electricity, transporting electricity to distribution companies, and then selling it to customers.

Total primary energy supply: The total amount of energy available for use in New Zealand, accounting for domestic production and trade. Total final consumption: Energy consumed by end-users such as factories and businesses. The share of renewables in total primary energy supply fell slightly, down 0.7 percentage points to 42.8 per cent.

Lines companies are mostly owned by consumer trusts or local councils, but some are privately owned. Retail companies buy electricity from generators and on-sell that electricity to businesses and households across New Zealand. For most New Zealand electricity customers, there's a lot of retailers and brands to buy electricity from.

New Zealand relies on a combination of domestically produced and imported fuels to meet its energy needs. A common metric used internationally to measure this is a self-sufficiency indicator, which shows how well we can meet our own energy supply needs through domestic production.

Concept Consulting's modelling shows that without thermal generation from the Rankine units as part of New Zealand's energy storage solution, wholesale electricity prices would likely be 60% higher in the short-term (the next two-to-three years) and 11% higher in the long-term (ten+ years).

There is value in New Zealand having diversity for its storage solutions, as seen by the impact of the lack of gas in Winter 2024. This white paper presents the key findings of that analysis, including considering a long list of solutions for flexibility and modelling of electricity prices under different scenarios.