Frank Energy is closing — what to do if you are a customer

Frank Energy is winding down. If you are one of its customers, you will end up with a different power company, and the only real question is whether you pick it or it picks you.

We do not list Frank among the companies we compare, for the obvious reason: sending someone to sign up with a retailer that is closing would be a bad introduction, whatever the rates looked like.

First, the reassuring part

Your power does not go off. A retailer exiting the market is a commercial event, not a physical one. The poles, wires and meter at your property belong to your lines company, which is unaffected, and the arrangements that govern the New Zealand electricity market exist precisely so that customers of a departing retailer keep being supplied.

Nobody comes to the property. Whatever happens next is an account change.

So there is no emergency here. There is a decision, and a window in which to make it well.

What happens if you do nothing

You would expect to be transferred to another retailer. That protects your supply, which is the point of it, and it is not designed to get you a good deal. It is designed to make sure you have one at all. A transferred customer typically lands on a standard plan rather than on the plan that suits their usage, their meter configuration or their user type.

If you are a low user, or you have controlled hot water, or you have solar, a default plan is particularly likely to be the wrong shape for you.

What to do instead

1. Find the notice Frank sent you and note the date on it. Your account's date is the one that matters, and we have deliberately not published a date here, because we have not confirmed one from Frank's own notice, and a guessed date on a page like this would be worse than none.
2. Ask Frank about any exit fee before you move. Get the answer in writing.
3. Get your annual kWh off a recent bill. You need it to compare properly, and it is harder to retrieve once the account closes.
4. Note your meter configuration: how many usage lines your bill shows, and whether one is labelled controlled. That decides which plans you can be offered.
5. Choose and switch. The process is the ordinary one: you sign up with the new retailer, they handle it, a reading is taken at the changeover, and your supply is not interrupted.

Keep the final bill

Whatever route you take, keep Frank's final bill. It is your record of the closing meter reading and of any credit balance owed to you, and chasing a credit from a company that is winding down is much easier with the paperwork than without it. If you are in credit and it does not arrive, complain in writing first, then take it to Utilities Disputes, the free, independent scheme for electricity and gas complaints in New Zealand.

Choosing a replacement

The things worth weighing are the same as for any switch: the daily charge and the unit rate together rather than either alone, whether the plan is fixed term and what it costs to leave, and whether the retailer can serve your meter configuration.

We compare 8 power companies. The national average price as at May 2026 was 42.04c per kWh including GST, useful as a benchmark, though what matters more is what your own address costs, which we publish for each of the 42 towns MBIE surveys.