Retail electricity prices in New Zealand: recent trends and the relationship to market shares

Abstract

This paper constructs a monthly price series for electricity retailers in New Zealand, broken down by region and retailer, from January 2018 until June 2023. Since 2014, there has been no such price series for New Zealand that is disaggregated by retailer. We find that, over the time period of our dataset, while average prices across the largest five retailers are consistently higher than that of the smaller retailers in our dataset, the gap has narrowed substantially. The narrowing of this price gap is associated with the following trends in market shares. While, from January 2018 to September 2021, the smaller retailers, taken as a group, made considerable gains in market share at the expense of the larger retailers, the growth in the market share of the smaller retailers in our dataset stagnated in the remainder of the time period.