Choosing a power company when you have solar

Once the system is on the roof, the remaining decisions are electricity decisions, and they are genuinely different from the ones a household without panels makes.

This is the part of solar we actually work on.

What changes about your bill

You buy much less, so the fixed half matters more. A power price is a daily charge plus a rate per unit. Cut your imported units substantially and the daily charge becomes a bigger share of the total. A plan with a low daily charge and a higher unit rate, the shape that suits low usage, often becomes the better deal after solar when it was not before.

You might now be a low user. Low-user status is measured on the electricity you buy, not the electricity you use. Households that were comfortably above the threshold before installing sometimes drop below it afterwards and never re-check. Worth doing once, and worth knowing that the regulated low-user daily charge is being phased out and disappears in April 2027.

You have a second price. The export rate your retailer pays for surplus. It is a real line in the comparison and it does not exist for anyone else.

Your usage shape changes. Imports concentrate in the evening and in winter, because that is when the panels are not producing and the house is drawing hardest. That shape interacts with time-of-use plans differently than a flat consumption pattern does.

How to compare properly

Use both of your own volumes:

1. Annual kWh imported and annual kWh exported, from twelve months of bills. If the system is new, the inverter's own monitoring gives you production, and the bill gives you import.
2. For each retailer, work out daily charge × 365 + imported units × import rate − exported units × export rate.
3. Compare those totals.

The step people skip is the third term's size relative to the second. In most New Zealand households imports outweigh exports by a wide margin across a year, especially once winter is included, so import rates usually dominate the annual total, and a headline export rate is a poor way to choose.

The five questions for a retailer

1. What is your current export rate, in writing?
2. Is it capped at a monthly volume, and what is paid above the cap?
3. Does it require a specific plan, and what are the import rates on that plan?
4. Can the rate change, and what notice would I get?
5. How is the credit applied: off the bill, or paid out if the account goes into credit?

Question 3 is the one that changes answers most often.

The practical side of switching

Switching is an account change. Nobody visits, the system is untouched, and the network approval already granted stays in place. The one thing that genuinely goes wrong is export billing not being set up correctly from the start, so tell the new retailer at sign-up that the property has solar, give the system size, and check the first bill shows an export line.

For reference, the national average import price as at May 2026 was 42.04c per kWh including GST, and we publish the figure for each of the 42 towns MBIE surveys. We compare 8 power companies and can show you what each offers at your address.