Glossary

 This is the term your retailer may use for Aurora Energy’s line charges. These are the costs for distributing electricity from Transpower’s national grid to your property, including poles, wires and transformers.

 Aurora Energy has three pricing areas, which have different line charges so customers in one pricing area aren’t cross-subsidising the costs to provide electricity in another part of the network. The three pricing areas are: Dunedin, Central Otago/Wānaka and Queenstown.

Aurora Energy’s line charges can be either fixed or variable. Fixed charges are the same for all customers regardless of how much electricity they use. Variable charges are calculated based on the amount of electricity customers use. It’s worth noting that Aurora Energy’s costs are mostly fixed, and over the next few years we expect that fixed lines charges will increase and variable lines charges will decrease.

It is common for households with electric hot-water heating to allow lines companies, like us, the ability to turn off the electricity supply to the hot water cylinder when the network is busy. This is known in the industry as controlled supply. The control periods typically occur on cold winter days for a few hours at a time and are not usually noticed by customers. We offer a lower tariff for supply that is controlled. The remaining supply to the household can’t be turned off by the lines company and is known as uncontrolled supply – the uncontrolled supply is charged at a higher rate.

In houses with newer meters, we can separately measure the controlled and uncontrolled supply and invoice accordingly. However, for many households in Dunedin, the meters are older, and we can’t measure the controlled and uncontrolled supply separately, so we apply an ‘all-inclusive’ tariff. All-inclusive is a term used across New Zealand and simply means that the tariff is an estimated blend of the controlled and uncontrolled rates based on historic use patterns across the network.