Amalgamate them

We've just had a big report commissioned from Frontier Economics into the workings of our electricity markets, with two peer reviews of its conclusions (one from NERA UK and another from a consortium of experts), and we've had the government's response to its recommendations, plus you might like to read the ministerial press release.

It's fair to say that the overwhelming reaction, including mine, has been that the government response have been too timid. That's not just me moaning: as Bryce Edwards of the Integrity Institute put it in his September 30 newsletter, "What’s striking is how broad the consensus is that these reforms are inadequate. From typically pro-market business voices to worker advocates, nearly everyone agrees the government needed to go much further".

There's one example in particular I'd like to highlight.

Frontier looked at the electricity distribution businesses (EDBs) - or 'lines businesses' as they're sometime called - who are the folks that operate the poles and lines that carry the current from the national grid to your place. New Zealand has 29 of them. On average their charges amount to about a quarter of your electricity bill. Even before all this latest analysis, I'd have argued that 29 is an absurd number for a country our size: it's almost the emblematic dead weight example of high fixed cost overkill.

Unsurprisingly, Frontier said (p112) that "Our key finding in this chapter is that the current electricity distribution industry is too fragmented with too many small EDBs (relative to the size of the country), many of whom are exempt from price-quality regulation designed to promote the long-term interests of consumers. These EDBs are likely to be operating well below minimum efficient scale. This, in turn, is limiting the ability of most EDBs to:

    • Operate and invest efficiently; and

    • Innovate to deliver services more effectively to consumers".

Their recommendation? "The first-best option would be to amalgamate the existing 29 EDBs into a small number (say five) large regional EDBs" (p133), and they even drew a map of what they might look like (see p135). Plus they recommended changes to how these regional natural monopolies should be regulated by the Commerce Commission, arguing (p5) that each should be considered on its own needs: "The implication being that individualised ex-ante price regulation applies to all EDBs. The intention being to ensure that the necessary investment is occurring to deliver the energy transition in New Zealand, and so avoid the prospect of a future bow wave of investment needs and reduced service performance in the interim".

So what did the two sets of peer reviewers reckon?

NERA agreed on amalgamation. "A consolidation and harmonisation of EDBs could achieve economies of scale, facilitate effective regulation and potentially improve quality of service to customers at lower prices" (p21). There's room for debate about exactly how many of the 'Super EDBs' and where they should operate - "Further detail is required on how the optimal number and size of Super EDBs can be determined" (p21) - which is fair comment, but they saw value in the amalgamation idea. They were cooler on the customised price regulation ideas: they weren't so sure that the current system was getting in the way of making necessary investments.

The other review group also were on board the amalgamation bus and drew this handy little diagram (p5) assessing Frontier's main ideas, where as you can see 'EDB Reform' (amalgamation plus the regulatory changes to incentivise investment) scrubbed up rather well. While the group made a general point that you might need to do more tyrekicking about any of these options - "each deserves much more scrutiny and analysis than can be accomplished within the timeframe of the current policy proceeding" (p4) - it said (p5) that "Of the four major proposals, the restructuring and reform of the EDBs strikes us as the most worthy of further consideration, given that it is backed by both qualitative economic logic and some empirical evidence".

Even the government itself said, in its response to Frontier's recommendation, "Agree with the diagnosis", but then said it wouldn't follow through on the idea: "Agree with diagnosis, but not with the forced amalgamation of EDBs. Instead, Government is encouraging greater efficiency and the EA [Electricity Authority] and Commerce Commission are progressing measures to promote greater alignment and innovation". 

It expanded on its reasons here: "Forced amalgamation would be expensive, complex, and undermine local decision-making. Rather than forcibly reducing the number of EDBs, the Government will make networks more efficient and innovative by encouraging greater standardisation and collaboration, strengthening governance and accountability, and improving network regulation".

To be fair, Frontier did have a look at something along the lines of the government's preferred option. Option 3 in its report (p139) "would be to retain the existing 29 EDBs as they are, but require them to coordinate with other EDBs within defined regions to generate better efficiency and operational outcomes", but it concluded (p140) that for a broad range of reasons it was "likely to be the least effective model for rationalisation".

Personally I find the government's rationale unconvincing. I doubt if it would be expensive: whatever up-front one-off restructuring costs are involved will surely be repaid in spades over the years as the current fixed costs of too many, too small EDBs are eradicated. I doubt if it is especially complex: if we can mesh the former separate cities of Auckland into one, we can surely mesh the EDBs. And I don't rate the local decision-making point especially highly. If the choice is between local control and the poles falling down on the one side, and consolidation and uninterrupted electricity supply on the other, and I think that is indeed the actual choice, I'll have the lights staying on, thanks.

The ComCom session at the NZAE conference

Last week the New Zealand Association of Economists hosted a Commerce Commission themed session at its annual conference. It's become a fixture in the past few years, I'm pleased to say, after a drought period where industrial organisation, competition and regulation didn't quite get the focus they deserved.

The Commerce Commission team - Diego Villalobos, who chaired the session, Geoff Brooke and Rae Rho - talk about productivity trends in the regulated electricity lines business, the regulatory cost of capital, and the competitive effect of new unmanned petrol stations

Geoff Brooke's presentation showed the large increases in allowable revenue for the electricity lines businesses (ELBs) which the Commission has proposed for the forthcoming 5-year regulatory period (from the Commission's draft decision). They're stonking great rises - more than a billion dollars extra in what makes up about a quarter of a household's electricity bill - and they add to all that upward pressure on domestic non-tradables prices that is already giving the Reserve Bank conniptions.

But they're justified, as you can see in the graph below which shows the underlying drivers: input cost inflation, a substantially higher weighted average cost of capital ('WACC') reflecting the rise in interest rate costs as ultra-easy monetary policy has changed to the current post-Covid tightening, and provision for increased opex and capex spending.

Diego Villalobos talked about a productivity study that ComCom commissioned from Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA), and which looked at the productivity trends in the electricity distribution business (i.e. the ELBs again). As ComCom's cover note about the research said, "The productivity of Electricity Distribution Businesses (EDBs), measured as their outputs relative to inputs, is an important performance indicator. Over time, we and other stakeholders expect EDB productivity to increase as they become more efficient and able to deliver the same services using fewer inputs".

Unfortunately the exact opposite has been happening: productivity has fallen, and sharply, as this extract from the CEPA work shows. 'Non-exempt' EDBs in the table are those directly revenue-regulated by ComCom, 'Exempt' are ones owned by local consumer trusts and which are only subject to an information disclosure regime. But either way both groups have shown steadily lower productivity.

And it doesn't seem to be an oddball result of anything weird CEPA has done: Stats NZ data for a broadly comparable sector (electricity, gas, water, waste services, the yellow line in the graph below) show a similar pattern. It's still possible that both CEPA and Stats are missing a trick somewhere along the line - I'd argue that in some sectors of the economy, particularly those closest to the internet and other IT, productivity is being systematically underestimated - but the first best guess looks to be that there is something sector-specific happening.

It would be nice to say we know what's going on here, but we don't. CEPA canvas some explanations in their Section 6, so have a read for yourself and see what you think, but thus far there don't seem to be any smoking guns.

And finally Rae talked about her research on the competitive impact on incumbents of new unmanned petrol stations opening up (full thing here, summary here). Here's her key result. Look at the red dots, which are the price responses from incumbent petrol stations within five minutes' drive when a new unmanned station opens: you'll see a 2-3 cents per litre reduction in the weeks after the new competitor opens. The black* dots are the response by incumbents who are five to ten minutes' drive away: zilch,  nicely demonstrating the geographical market definition for petrol.

As well as this event study examining response to new entry, there was also a cross-section analysis comparing petrol prices where incumbents face at least one unmanned competitor within a five minute catchment: "On average, Regular 91 prices are 6.1 cpl [cents per litre] lower in local markets where at least one non-supermarket unstaffed site is present, compared to those with staffed sites only". 

There was a bit of discussion in the Q&A about whether ComCom ought to go around the country telling local authority land use planners about these results, and encouraging them to free up areas that new unmanned petrol stations could use. Quite right, too: if the councillor for a particular ward would like the credit for petrol becoming 6 cents a litre cheaper for his or her constituents, there's an easy way to help bring it about.

*A correction, I'd earlier mistakenly repeated 'red' again

In the eye of the beholder

There's been a lot of focus on what looks like a large $7.5 billion fiscal surplus in the fiscal year just ended. Part of it, as Treasury explained in the financial statements for the year, is due to various one-offs, which in a nerdy fiscal policy wonk sort of way, I'd thought I'd have a look at.

I didn't come across anything earth-shattering, although personally - and this'll show why accountancy is not my forte - I wouldn't have put any of the revaluation gains arising from a change in how the rail network is valued into the surplus, which is, after all, the "operating balance excluding gains and losses". But as explained on p15, the surplus includes $2.6 billion of "Reversal of prior year impairments that impacts OBEGAL". Never mind.

Along the way I came across something interesting, and it's this. Down the back of the statements you can see the value placed on the government's ownership interest in three electricity generators, Genesis, Mercury and Meridian. The Auditor-General's audit report says (p35) that "As outlined in Note 16, the electricity generation assets, which are at least 51% owned by the Government, are valued at $17.2 billion at 30 June 2019. The valuation of these assets is carried out by specialist valuers because of the complexity and significance of the assumptions about the future prices of electricity, the generation costs, and the generation volumes that these assets will create".

Note 16 shows that the specialists' valuations are based on the net present value of future earnings (give or take), and that's fine. But then I wondered, why don't the accounts just use the market price? Maybe modern accounting policy doesn't support the approach, though I seem to remember that post the GFC, there was a move to have more investments and liabilities "marked to market", i.e. valued at what they'd actually fetch rather than on some notional basis that might flatter the real-life value of investments or minimise the real-world cost of liabilities.

So here are the valuations at market price as well as the valuations on the government's books.

The valuations on the fiscal books are (unless I've got my calculations wrong) uniformly higher than what the financial markets say. There's nothing sinister about that: I'd guess the financial accounts are required by the accounting standards framework to follow some acceptable valuation methodology, and this is how the cards have fallen.

But it's an interesting outcome. It's intriguing that the markets don't think the generators are worth what the valuers' approach shows. Now, it may be that the answer to any valuation question depends on the context of the question: a valuation to establish a regulatory asset base, for example, may have its own imperatives. But even so, you look at the two sets of numbers, and you're tempted to ask, who's right? What does one approach know that the other doesn't?.

Good stuff

Little did I know, when I got antsy the other day about where the electricity price review had got to, that Dr Megan Woods, the Minister of Energy and Resources, was only days away from publishing the review's final report and responding to it (all the relevant documents - government decision, Cabinet minute, final review report, and the earlier options paper - are here).

The review's got extensive media coverage so no need to reinvent the wheel here - in particular there's an excellent piece by Stuff's Tom Pullar-Strecker, 'A run down on the Government power plan', that ticks all the what-you-need-to-know boxes.

Overall the review team and the government have done a fine job. I don't find myself quibbling with much, even though some of the recommendations looked a bit counterintuitive at first. Banning "win back" counter-offers from incumbents - preventing them competing back, as it were - at first blush doesn't look supportive of the competitive process, but when you think about it a bit more it is necessary for competition to work at all in this area (the thought had crossed our minds when we made our switch). Similarly the ban on prompt payment discounts, which aren't the reward to consumers they appear but effectively act as regressive late payment charges on financially stressed households. The abolition of low fixed charge plans is in the same bucket: sounded like a good pro-consumer idea, turned out (among other things) to "unintentionally shift costs to households with low incomes and high electricity consumption" (final report, p62).

Increasing the ability of electricity retailers to hedge against price volatility is an especially useful idea. Normally both buyers and sellers of commodities like energy have a joint interest in a functional futures market ( a 'contract market' in the sector terminology): they both see value in price predictability. Less so in our energy sector, when the availability of price insurance helps challenger retailers compete more effectively with the gentailers' own retail arms. Effective retail competition needs an effective hedging mechanism, and if market-making in a contract market needs to be imposed on generators, so be it.

Both regulators in this area - the Electricity Authority and the Commerce Commission - get some raps on the knuckles, particularly for lack of consumer engagement. The final report said (p12)

A frequent complaint we heard from consumers was that neither the Commerce Commission nor the Electricity Authority – but particularly the latter – listened to, or took account of, their views. Consumers need to see regulators making a concerted effort to understand their points of view. Nothing beats meeting people in person. It was disappointing, therefore, that neither regulator attended the stakeholder meeting in Te Kuiti convened by The Lines Company at our request. Both would have benefited from hearing residents’ stories, as well as understanding their expectations of regulators – the chief of which is that they focus on consumers’ long-term interests.

Oops. It hasn't helped that on several other fronts progress has been too slow. It's understandable that the Minister is now getting impatient. On the contract market, for example she said that "I want to be assured the fragility previously observed in the wholesale market at times of stress is not repeated in future, and I will make it clear I do not want to wait for a “better solution” that might never be found" (decision paper, para 96). She noted that "The Electricity Authority has been reviewing transmission pricing for more than ten years" (para 102). And she's prepared to bypass the Authority if it doesn't get on with the review recommendations (see paras 34-5).

The Authority, and the Commission, are independent agencies as the Cabinet decision recognises, and can't be told to jump to ministerial whim, and in general I'm no fan of expanding ministerial discretion in an already micromanaged and over-politicised economy. But our policymaking and regulatory processes are too slow, and on this occasion a bit of holding feet to the fire doesn't seem amiss.

Two final points. The proposed new Consumer Advocacy Council for the electricity sector could, as the decision says (para 40) "potentially be extended to cover gas, telecommunications and other utility services ... This is because consumers of those services, which are increasingly bundled with electricity, are also likely to lack an effective voice". It's not just the consumer voice issue: it's the sit there and be ripped off consumer inertia issue, too, which is liable to be just as prevalent in those sectors and which, to be honest, no country has really got its head around. The Brits and the Aussies have been equally befuddled ('Have we got the same problems?'). An early task for the Council should be to reach for some industrial strength behavioural economics research.

And finally, as both the review and the government's response acknowledge, the energy hardship some households are experiencing isn't so much down to locally high electricity prices - the review said (p1) that "residential prices on average ranked 10th lowest among 35 OECD countries in 2017" - as locally inadequate incomes to pay them. It would be nice if this, and successor, governments showed the same urgency to get on with raising living standards as they have in reforming the electricity business ('Are we serious?').

Did it work?

A year ago, in the interest of making competition work, we switched our electricity supplier ('We take the plunge'). And now that we've got a year of bills from our NewCo, we can compare them with what our OldCo used to charge. Here's how it worked out.

Pretty good, eh? So there's not a lot of reason for you to be one of the 400,000 to 750,000 people who've never switched, is there? Off you go to Consumer New Zealand's Powerswitch or the Electricity Authority's What's My Number. Make the competitive process work for you.

Incidentally, that estimate of the very large number of people who've never switched came from the Electricity Price Review. As its website says, "Please note: the review delivered its final report to the Minister of Energy and Resources on 29 May 2019. The timing of its public release has yet to be determined".

Good policy development shouldn't be precipitate, but I'm leaning towards the view that four months is enough thinking time given that a range of options were canvassed and consulted on during the review process (if you've forgotten them, head to 'At A Glance', which is p3 here). It's getting time to see the report and the government's response.

We take the plunge...

...and in the interests of scientific inquiry our household has a go at changing electricity retailers.

Time, in short, to stop being the competition equivalent of an unmarried marriage counsellor, and actually use the tools available to increase competition in electricity retailing.

We haven't been averse to switching in the past, but I'd got disillusioned by the first wave of retail competition. The phone would go - it was usually telephone marketing then - and we'd get an offer. Of sorts: a lower fixed daily rate but a higher cents per unit usage rate, or a lower cents per unit usage rate and a higher fixed daily rate. No offer at that time was unambiguously better than your incumbent's tariff, with lower fixed and lower usage rates. You were reduced to getting out a calculator and figuring out whether you'd actually be better off.

So we ended up in the large number of people who didn't switch - somewhere between 400,000 to 750,000 households, according to our recent Electricity Price Review - and helped provide a captive base for the retailers to exploit. As this graph from the Review shows, the gap between the best and worst price plan, and the gap between the best plan and the incumbent's in a a particular area, have been widening, suggesting (Review, p38) that "those consumers who don’t or can’t easily shop around are paying more and more than they need to".

It's been a bit of a mystery - in the UK, in Australia, here - why consumers just sit there and apparently let themselves be exploited. You can't - and shouldn't - ever rule out the possibility that their decisions are entirely rational: when a lot of people do something, there tends to be a reason. But equally the conventional wisdom is more down the lines of low switching reflecting some form of problem in the switching market.

So I set out, with our sample of one, to see if I could figure out what it might be.

I went for Consumer's Powerswitch though I could as easily have used the Electricity Authority's What's My Number. It went easily enough, though I discovered two little wrinkles.

One was that our incumbent - who I'll call Oldco - didn't make it obvious what pricing plan we were currently on (unlike our broadband or mobile suppliers, who do). I figured it out from the wording of the charge for unit usage, and by matching our charges (after grossing up for GST) with those shown (GST inclusive) in the drop-down menu of Oldco pricing plans that appears on Powerswitch.

The other was that Oldco didn't show annual electricity consumption, which you need to get the best plan for you. Powerswitch says that your retailer will tell you if you ask, but it isn't volunteered (or not anywhere I could find on the bill or using Oldco's online app). You can however add up your last twelve months' bills manually, so I did (a little over 9,000 kWh).

Powerswitch came up with a wide range of competitive alternatives, with annual savings of around $500 to $600, or roughly 20%. Well worth having, so I pressed the 'Switch' button and signed up with Newco.

And it's at that point that I unearthed at least one of the reasons for consumer reluctance to switch. Putting aside the associated free and frank discussion on lack of intra-household consultation, what most concerned my better half was, "what if something goes wrong?"  (in our case enlivened by recollection of a previous attempt to change broadband supplier, which had gone phut). This is (I gather from para 9.210 on p504 of the UK electricity review) quite a common fear, though higher among those who haven't switched than among those who've actually given it a go:

We agree with the views expressed by some parties that the perception of problems by those who had not attempted to switch appears to be somewhat greater than the experience of problems by those who had. In contrast to the experience of those who shopped around or switched, 66% of those who did not shop around or switch in the last three years agreed that ‘switching is a hassle I do not have time for’ (compared with 40% of those who had shopped around or switched in the last three years) and 57% agreed ‘I worry things will go wrong if I switch’ (compared with 37% of those who had shopped around or switched in the last three years).

In the end the spirit of pro-competitive market discipline prevailed over fears of a cock-up, and Newco got the tick.

When Newco contacted us, they said that "During this process you may get a call from the previous power company", and rather disarmingly added, "that’s what we’d do". And Oldco indeed e-mailed us, offering a cash rebate, a bigger prompt payment discount, a two-year price guarantee (which was also part of the Newco offer), and - belatedly - the offer of a better pricing plan (with an element of lock-in for two years).

No deal. We're gone to Newco. Some critical mass of people need to follow through on switching, or the system won't work. And - accepting that our own inertia let them get away with it - we're not feeling especially charitable to Oldco. A short term profit focus may well lead the Oldcos of this world to offer poor default plans, anticipating (often correctly) that you won't jib. But if I were in a corner suite at Oldco and thinking strategically about longer-term customer goodwill and regulatory risks, I think I'd be questioning the wisdom of the old way of running the whelk stall.

We've scrubbed up well

Last week MBIE published the first report of the Electricity Price Review - you can find it and its supporting documents here. If it's all new to you, you might want to start with the 'at a glance' summary. If you'd like an eminently sensible media think piece on the review, try Pattrick Smellie's 'Electricity review a smoking pop-gun'. And if you'd like a pot pourri of select items of interest, read on.

First of all, full marks for plain English. The review said (p3) that "The panel was very conscious of the need to ensure this first report was succinct and easily understood by the public", and it shows. The review team credits Peter Riordan of THINKWRITE - well done, that man. Economics, regulation, public policy analysis in general - all can, and should, be made more lucid than they usually are.

On substance, I especially liked this bit of analysis prepared for the review by Concept Consulting.

The logic here, from p32 of the review, is that

Contract prices that were above costs on a sustained basis would suggest weak competition among generators, and that the entry, or threatened entry, of new generators was not restraining prices. On the other hand, prices that were well below costs on a sustained basis would suggest looming problems with reliability of supply because new investment would not be able to keep pace with demand. The comparison suggests competition has been effective in restraining prices. Figure 14 shows how wholesale prices have moved broadly in line with the cost of adding more capacity. Importantly, there is no evidence contract prices have been above costs on a sustained basis in recent years.

That's good to know, because an alternative analysis in the review (pp45-6, with more detail on pp7-8 of the Technical Paper) which attempted to gauge whether the gentailers are earning excessive profits was not convincing. Granted, there were data issues for the review in trying to figure it out. In the end it used a proxy for profits - net cash from operations, ex tax ex interest, adjusted for inflation and the amount of electricity generated -  which showed little change in recent years.

But even if you accept that the proxy is okay, the exercise doesn't answer the 'excessive profits' question at all. Steady net cash flows could mean excessive profits, or, equally, inadequate profits, all the way through. The important question is, what are the profits relative to some measure of the capital employed in the business? That went unanswered.

Something else left a bit up in the air in the review was exactly why the distribution lines businesses went from overcharging business customers to (somewhat) overcharging residential customers for their shares of the distribution costs. There's no arguing about what went on: as the review says (p21), "Shifting costs from businesses to householders was the biggest factor in residential price increases between 1990 and 2018 (a development that began in the early 1980s). During this period, distribution charges for householders rose 548 per cent, while those for commercial and some industrial businesses fell 58 per cent", and here's the graph if you prefer graphs. But, why?

Maybe everyone in the electricity game already knows that the re-apportionment of costs was actually a move from a rort on businesses to something more rational (even if it has now overshot a bit the other way). As MBIE's 'Chronology of New Zealand electricity reform' says (p2), "In 1985 local distribution and supply were the responsibility of sixty-one electricity supply authorities (ESAs) - (there were ninety-three [!] in 1945). These were electorally oriented, statutory monopolies. Inefficiency, lack of customer choice and cross-subsidies resulted". But this may no longer be obvious to the reader in the street, and the review could usefully have given a bit more of the historical context against which this subsequent reallocation has occurred.

Before the review came out, I'd speculated that "there's a good chance that we may have made a better go of publicising and facilitating switching [by retail electricity customers from one supplier to another] than either the UK or Australia with initiatives like the Electricity Authority's WhatsMyNumber". In the end the review wasn't able to come to a conclusive answer (partly because it got a big data dump very late in the piece), but it's still possible we're making a better fist of it than others are (p39):

Overall, some stakeholders consider retail competition is stronger here than in Australia and the United Kingdom, based on measures such as switching rates and savings available from switching. However, some stakeholders consider that, like Australia and the United Kingdom, a two-tier retail market is developing, in which those who actively shop around enjoy the benefits of competition, and those who don’t pay higher prices.

There's heaps more interesting stuff in the review, which broadly comes to the conclusion that we're not too shabby at all when it comes to organising our electricity affairs. There are certainly things to work on - make a decision on transmission pricing methodology, figure out how to incorporate more renewables and accommodate all the new solar cell and battery technologies, do something about raising the lines businesses' efficiency, get a better grip on what's behind consumer switching inertia, and dig into why retailers' costs seem to be unusually high - but by international standards we're pretty hot stuff.

You might perhaps feel otherwise if you focussed on the 'energy hardship' issues for poorer households that made the headlines. But to my mind, that's got a lot less to do with allegedly excessive power prices - "New Zealand’s average residential price was in the lower half of all OECD countries in 2016" (review, p23) - and a good deal more to do with our internationally challenged level of absolute income, and with its distribution. The answers to energy hardship - and food, housing, clothing, medical, and educational hardship - lie more in the realm of raising national productivity and operating a more effective tax and welfare system.

And it's not just this review taking an upbeat view of how we're travelling. It went under my radar when it came out first, but the International Energy Agency has been trekking its way through the energy policies of its member countries, and here are some quotes from the executive summary of its 2017 New Zealand review:

New Zealand has an effective energy-only market. It is a world leading example of a well-functioning electricity market [I think they mean the wholesale generation market here], which continues to work effectively ... New Zealand has the highest penetration of geothermal energy and a significant contribution from hydro. Without any direct subsidies or public support, their share in electricity and heat supply has grown in recent years ... This [renewables] performance is a world-class success story among IEA member countries ... To date, New Zealand’s market design and operation of an energy-constrained system offer a high degree of operational variability, and the system has managed peak and seasonal demand variability successfully for decades. The transmission system operator Transpower is experienced and adept at managing supply and demand adequacy, and the power system demonstrates considerable flexibility and resilience. Other IEA member countries could learn from this experience

We've got a well-established knock-em-down commentariat in New Zealand, and I've done a bit of it myself. So for a change it's nice to be able to say we're doing things a good deal better than your average bear.

Have we got the same problems?

Earlier this week the LEANZ programme of Auckland seminars got a more than usually eminent speaker: Professor Sir Martin Cave, who among many other achievements is now chair-elect of the UK's energy regulator the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem).

Picture from http://www.martincave.org.uk/

He was on his way to Wellington to assist MBIE's Electricity Price Review, given his background as one of the members of the UK's extensive two-year review of the British electricity markets (for regulation uberwonks, all the source material you'll ever want can be sourced here, and for the rest of us the summary report is here). If I've got it right I think the invitation to New Zealand came from Vector, but in any event Vector certainly hosted the Auckland event, emceed as usual by Richard Meade. Well done, folks, LEANZ activities in Auckland and Wellington depend on business support.

The gist of what Martin said was that the review found the wholesale market was working tolerably well: there was room for some improvements but it generally got the green tick. The distribution (lines) businesses were already closely regulated. But the retail market - that was quite a different story. There appeared to be a large lump of captive customers, or if not captive, at least not interested in escape. As the summary says (p22), "72% said they had never switched tariff with an existing supplier, did not know it was possible, or did not know if they had done so". It will be no surprise that the incumbent retailers had them on expensive tariffs. The summary says (pp45-6) that

we estimated the detriment from excessive prices to the domestic customers of the Six Large Energy Firms to be about £1.4 billion [NZ$2.7 billion] a year on average over 2012 to 2015, the entire period for which we had data, with an upwards trend, reaching almost £2 billion [NZ$3.9 billion] in 2015. We consider this our headline estimate of the annual detriment arising from high domestic retail market prices.

In our discussion in Auckland, we had some difficulty getting our heads around this. In particular, why aren't the excessive returns from these passive victims competed away? To which the answer was, you can wave attractive offers in front of them till you're blue in the face, but They. Won't. Move.

Which leads to the next obvious question, why not? Many theories. Part of it appears to be down to the characteristics of the customers who have "disengaged". The review ran a big survey which found (p33) that "those who have low incomes, have low qualifications, are living in rented accommodation or who are above 65 are less likely to be engaged in the domestic retail energy markets against a variety of indicators of engagement". The already disadvantaged, as usual, fare worst.

There are also process explanations (p35): "there is some evidence indicating that the process of searching for an alternative supplier and successfully switching has been problematic for some customers. Significantly, the perception of the complexity and burden of the process appears to be worse than the reality, which may further dissuade domestic customers from shopping around and/or switching".

And if you accept all this - and for balance maybe you should read this piece which UK consultancy Oxera did for one of the Big Six, and which disputed the excess profits and argued that there might be perfectly rational  reasons for customers not to bother switching - the final questions we knocked about for a while were, what do you do about it? And have we in New Zealand got the same issues?

In the UK, they are pressing a number of buttons at once, trying to work on both the lumpen demand (eg by setting up an accessible database of non-switchers that will be easier to market to) and the excess profits from too-high prices. Legislation was passed in the UK last month to impose price caps, which will kick in this coming northern hemisphere winter.

That will help people with their bills, but price caps are a clunky bit of economic regulation that is generally not nearly as good as getting to the root of impediments to effective pro-consumer competition (though that's easy to say 11,000 miles away from the problems). You'd wonder - and we kicked this about a bit with Martin - whether you wouldn't be better off with transfer payments directly to the disadvantaged who have big power bills. A better-targeted version of our recent winter energy package would deal to the immediate affordability problems while leaving room for more market-oriented solutions to competition impediments.

Have we got the same issues? While we're not clones of our neighbours, it's interesting that the Aussies have something similar to the UK. The final report from the ACCC's Retail Electricity Pricing Inquiry, released last month, found (from the media release) that "It is clear that most households are paying far too much for electricity. In addition, some of the most vulnerable in our community are forced to struggle through freezing winters and scorching summers, with many others also having difficulty paying their bills".

The Aussies have also gone for price controls: the ACCC recommends "Abolishing the current retail ‘standing’ offers (which are not the same between retailers), and replacing them with a new ‘default’ offer consistent across all retailers, set at a price determined by the Australian Energy Regulator".

And while we haven't seen anything definitive yet from our own inquiry, its latest process update to stakeholders says that "we have already identified common positions on some key areas. A notable example is that some consumers are genuinely unable to afford such basics as heating their homes, and that something must be done to help them".

That's suggestive that we're broadly in the same area, too, though I'll wait to see the evidence, and I also think there's a good chance that we may have made a better go of publicising and facilitating switching than either the UK or Australia with initiatives like the Electricity Authority's WhatsMyNumber. If we have a problem, though, I hope we don't default to price caps as the easy to reach for answer. Make the market work better is the first best option: go elsewhere only if you have to.

This year's RBB Economics conference

Last week's RBB Economics conference in Sydney lived up to its six excellent predecessors (write-ups of last year's: keynote addresses, using economists, mergers, competition law).

Rod Sims, the chair of the ACCC, led off on the theme of  'Towards the new era in competition law'. Mostly the 'new' bits centred around changes to legislation. The Aussies'  Competition and Consumer Act (the CCA) has a new s45 on anti-competitive 'concerted practices', and an improved version of s46 dealing with abuse of market power, which incorporates the 'effects' test for use of market power as recommended by the Aussies' Harper review of competition policy.

We, on the other hand, are still lumbered with the 'taking advantage of market power' test that the Aussies have moved on from. As our Commerce Commission said in its just-released Briefing to its Incoming Minister

The Commission supports changes to Section 36 [our abuse of market power provision] as our enforcement programme continues to be constrained by practical difficulties in applying the legal tests set down by the courts. We note that the equivalent misuse of market power provision in the Australian Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Section 46) has been amended (and came into effect in October this year), ostensibly to overcome similar issues and limitations encountered by the ACCC with ‘market power’ cases.

Don't know what cavilling nitpicker put 'ostensibly' in there: there's no ostensibly about it. Rod Sims said that "the old Section 46 saw us powerless to deal with a range of behaviour by powerful firms in many parts of the value chain who were stopping their competitors competing on their merits". The Aussies did have issues. They did have limitations. They've had a go at fixing them. We haven't (yet).

If the Aussies are ahead of us in some areas, it was nice to see that at least sometimes we have made the running. Currently our Commission does both merger clearances (no lessening of competition involved) and merger authorisations (there's a lessening, but it's worth it on a net public benefit basis), and has done for yonks. In Australia however there was an 'informal' clearance regime run by the ACCC (though in practice it became rather formalised and not unlike our clearance process), but authorisations went to the Australian Competition Tribunal. Now both clearances and authorisations go to the ACCC in the first instance, which makes total sense. So it was nice to see our own Mary-Anne Borrowdale, general counsel in the competition branch of the Commerce Commission, explaining to the Aussies how the processes work in practice and how to make them work smoothly for everyone.

Sims also made the good point that enforcing a competition regime is even more important these days when people are more than usually concerned about inequality and inequity. As he said, "Often populism opposes the essence of our market economy because it seems to many that the common person loses out and a small elite get wealthy at their expense. As I have repeatedly said, however, the role of the CCA is to ensure that our market economy does, and is seen to, work as it should, to the benefit of people generally".

I was struck by a couple of other things he said. One was that the ACCC has five criminal cartel cases with the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions on top of others they've already pinged ("shipping, polycarbonate roofing, electrical cable, air freight, electrical componentry in cars, foreign exchange in the banking sector, airline tickets, and laundry detergent"), plus "there are others in our now‑healthy pipeline from our investment in establishing our serious cartels unit". Like all cartel policemen, he's got an interest in talking up his book, if only to make cartel leniency programmes look more attractive to potential dobbers-in: those five with the CDPP for all I know could all be the other Japanese shipping lines after NYK rolled over on its erstwhile co-conspirators. But even after allowing for some puffery it does leave me wondering: if the ACCC is finding stuff, are we? And if not, why not?

Sims also said that the ACCC had won a prize for competition advocacy. I'd never heard of the International Competition Network (ICN) / World Bank competition advocacy contest: now that I have, and acknowledging that we in New Zealand can't go through life forever making invidious comparisons with our Aussie mates, I wouldn't mind at all if the Commerce Commission was on the ICN / World Bank podium some day.

Luke Woodward, partner and head of the competition and regulation practice at Gilbert + Tobin, followed Sims on the same 'new era' topic (summary here, full remarks here). It put the evolution of Australia's competition regime in historical perspective. He said that "in Australia we developed an excessive level of legal formalism, where statutory construction has at times predominated over competition analysis. This approach has been rigid and not well able to flexibly adapt to developments in thinking over time...Section 46 suffered this fate: it started poorly with judicial glosses; was put on a good workable footing... and then...an artificial and disconnected legalistic approach to causal connections was introduced. The ACCC got shy and backed off. The hunting dog retreated to the porch".

But now Australia is in a potentially better position - potentially, because it might get to a place where the substance and the economics prevail over the legalism, or it might not. As Luke said, "The ACCC’s s 45 and s 46 guidelines don’t as of yet provide any guidance around the competitive theories of harm that the ACCC considers applying. In form, they are documents that look more like they were written by lawyers or administrators with an eye to warning businesses and keeping options open; rather than written by economists articulating a coherent economic theory of harm".

Other presenters - notably Peter Armitage from Ashurst (on s45) and Kirsten Webb from Clayton Utz (on s46) - made similar points about early days, detail still needing to be filled in, and how things might yet develop through the cases. Where the Aussies take s46 in particular will be hugely important to us if (as I think likely) we'll eventually join them in changing our law to match theirs. Whether we'll opt for a 'concerted practices' provision is more debatable. I can see a logic to one, but as Armitage argued, it's not fully clear what its reach is. If it's meant to catch anti-competitive things that aren't quite caught by the traditional 'contract, arrangement or understanding', fair enough. But (as he instanced) what about the example of smaller coal or iron producers swinging in behind the prices negotiated by the big guys with the big Chinese and Japanese buyers? There's a risk of overreach.

Luke Woodward also had some questions about the ACCC's extensive series of market studies: one came out on the morning of the conference (on the dairy industry), and another one has got underway since (a highly interesting one, on digital platforms). Luke worried that they might be going too far: for example, "If regulators themselves are prone to regulatory failure,then having found market failures, we run the risk of not correcting market failures, but simply adding regulatory failure to market failure" (read his full comments on pp 9-11 of his speech). All I can say is, it's a nice problem to have: up to now our Commerce Commission has been left twiddling its thumbs. The new government, goaded by the petrol  market, looks like it'll finally - finally - let the Commission proactively look at competition issues, but at the usual glacial pace of legislative and policy change in this area it'll be late next year before they have the powers, and 2019 and beyond before we see anything from them.

We also had sessions on competition issues in key industries, the pick for me being RBB's George Siolis with his commentary on the ACCC's retail electricity inquiry. At the risk of making those invidious comparisons again, I was left with the clear view that we've managed a much better job of regulating electricity lines businesses than the Aussies have, partly because Aussie lines companies were able to see off the regulator's decisions through the courts (a bolt hole that's since been sealed off).

All up, an engrossing conference, and well done RBB Economics. We're fortunate - in Australia and New Zealand - to have a variety of high level fora where these kinds of issues can get serious treatment. On our side of the ditch, though - those damn comparisons again - we're not very good at translating them into worthwhile reforms within any sensible timeframe.

They're like buses...

...no sooner did we get a big chunk of reporting on the electricity markets on Tuesday from the Electricity Authority (which I posted about), but on Wednesday we got the latest information disclosure data on the electricity lines businesses from the Commerce Commission. Here's the (brief) media release and here's the entrance point to the data, which cover the period ending March '17.

It's an odd industry sector. Mostly, in a small economy like ours, we risk having heavily concentrated sectors with limited numbers of players, but we've also some sectors where you wonder how we go on supporting the numbers we do, and, you'd suspect, with the accompanying issues of inefficiencies of scale. The electricity lines game is one that looks like it could do with quite a bit of rationalisation: twenty-nine lines companies for 4.8 million people looks over the top, especially as some are very tiny indeed in terms of customer numbers.

Buller Electricity, the smallest, has only 4,579 customer connections: for perspective, the median lines company has some 185,000 connections, and the biggest (Vector) has over 550,000. There's no reason barring historical accident why Buller should be a standalone entity, and why it hasn't been folded into neighbouring Westpower long ago is a mystery to me. It wouldn't be a massive efficiency - Westpower itself has only 13,448 connections - but it would be a start. Similarly for the rest of the minnows - Scanpower in Dannevirke (6,690 connections), Centralines in Waipukurau (8,496), Nelson Electricity (9,203), and Network Waitaki in Oamaru (12,710).

But we are where we are, as they say, and if you want to find out pretty much anything about the current 29, the comprehensive Commerce Commission data is where to go.

There are terrific snapshots of each one on its own if you click on the map of the lines' networks and follow the 'Download doc' link provided for each network. Here for random example is just a small part of the data on the Orion network showing the state of its lines and cables assets, and there's lots more on its operating and financial performance.

The data are not, however, the most accessible thing you'll ever use if you want to make comparisons. The summary report on each company does give some ranking information on how it compares with the others (Orion for example ranks 3rd on a lot of metrics), but if you take the view - as I do - that a good deal of the value from information disclosure regimes comes from looking at relative performance, you'll likely want more than the single-company summaries will give you.

The good news is that the information is there, but it's not immediately obvious where*. So just to make the whole thing easier, I've done it for you - here's a 'Handy ELB ranking guide', where I've also done a bit of colouring (price/quality regulated companies in red, information disclosure companies in black) plus fixed the 'return on investment' line so it better displays the return.

The data are a great starting point for analysis, and could answer any number of interesting questions: are there, for example, any systematic differences between the consumer-owned companies (subject only to information disclosure) and the rest of them (subject to price/quality control)? And what about those efficiencies of scale that I've implicitly assumed earlier? Research economists are always on the look-out for that treasure-trove of as-yet-untilled data: here's a prime candidate.

Whether anyone is, in fact, making good analytical use of this information is another question. It would probably help - and I understand the Commission has it in its plans - to put out some version of this data with interpretative commentary for a general audience, as the Telco Commissioner for example does with annual reports on the telco sector (they're here if you haven't seen them). Information disclosure as a regulatory option has its uses, and maybe those most keenly interested in the sector won't need the info spoon-fed for them, but for the bulk of the intelligent public this very useful data could do with a bit more PR assistance.


*If you go to the network map and scroll down, under 'Documents' you'll see there's a link to a spreadsheet, 'Performance summaries for electricity distributors - Year to 31 March 2017'.  Go to the 'One-pager' sheet of the spreadsheet. Top left, just under the 'Clipboard' command, there's an input box with a dropdown arrow: currently it says 'edb-name'.  Click on the down arrow, from the options that pop up pick 'r-rank', and hey presto - up come two sets of rankings of all 29, one showing the absolute values of the measures and the order showing each company's rank from 1 to 29.

More, please

The Electricity Authority has just come out with its latest annual report, and I was pleased to see it continues to report on the state of competition in the various electricity markets: competition, along with efficiency and reliability, are the three core things the Authority focuses on.

It's also great to see the Authority having a go at measuring whether electricity markets have actually become more competitive or not. It's good that there are specifics like the success of the What's My Number campaign, but it's better again if you can assemble some hard or hardish data on the state of overall competitive play. You're never going to pin it down exactly but this Annual Report - and previous exercises which I posted about here and here - have given it a good go.

Here are a couple of the more interesting measures the Authority has tracked (they're down the back in Appendix A). The HHI concentration index for the residential retail market is going down - though it's still on the borderline (2500 or so) between "moderately concentrated" and "highly concentrated" as the US competition authorities would describe it - and the market shares of the top 1, 2 3 and 4 suppliers (the CR measures in the right hand panel) have been slowly dropping.

Here's the HHI for the generation market. It's far from a dramatic movement, but every little helps.

Here's something a bit more complex - the percentage of time a large generator has had the field to itself in a particular area: it's the only one around who can supply energy, and it has surplus energy to provide after meeting its own retail or other contractual demand. In the industry jargon it is the "net pivotal supplier", or in plain English it can hold the rest of us to ransom and ramp up prices. Again it's good news: it doesn't happen very often. There's a net pivotal supplier only 2% of the time.

Things like market shares however don't always tell you a lot: you could, for example, have vigorous competitors going at it hammer and tongs, with their marketing efforts cancelling each other out, so market shares don't move, or you could have cosy tacit collusion, and again market shares don't move. So the Authority has chucked in some behavioural data as well. Here's how often residential customers get approached to switch suppliers. Answer: more often.

Overall, the data show some modest to decent improvement in competition across many, though not all, metrics. Good stuff.

But I'll bet there's a question already on your mind. How come we're not seeing this sort of information coming out on other important markets?

Partly, of course, it's because most other sectors don't have a sectoral regulator. But partly it's because the Commerce Commission still remains hamstrung in its abilities to have a look. There is a proposal to let it do "market studies", but (as I said here) it's very tightly circumscribed and in any event is some considerable time away from being implemented, given the glacial pace of changes to our competition law.

Yet we know that we need to find out more about the sort of competitive choice consumers are getting in other industries beyond electricity (where the Authority is doing a fine job) and telecommunications (where the Telco Commissioner is also on the ball). We know, for example, that consumers face higher prices for petrol in areas where Gull isn't a competitor, but we only know that because MBIE was ordered to look into it as a one-off investigation.

Why aren't we getting the same level of pro-consumer inquiry in other markets?

There's always one...

Earlier this week the Commerce Commission came out with the second of its reviews of the sorts of contracts you and I get asked to sign when we sign up for our utilities. The latest one is a review of the electricity retailers (media release, full report as pdf); in February the Commission had gone over the typical telco contracts (media release, full report as pdf).

The Fair Trading Act, and the new bits in it on unfair contract terms which triggered these reviews, aren't usually my thing: to be honest, I knew nothing about the new provisions before the Commission's Ben Hamlin took us through them at last weekend's CLPINZ workshop. But now that I've looked at these reviews, I was struck by an unusual pattern which emerged from the pair of them. Here is the distribution of the number of potentially unfair contract terms found in each sector, by company.

Which is why I've called this post, "There's always one...". Because there is: in both sectors there is one company that's gone way beyond the others when packing its contracts with consumer-unfriendly terms. Equally there's one at the other end of the scale (in electricity it's more like a closely-bunched group of three) with remarkably few of the small print gotchas.

A good slab of these contract terms were not objectively necessary - as the Commission said on both occasions, "In some instances the companies were able to provide information to the Commission to show that the term was necessary to protect the legitimate business interests of the company. In all other cases, the companies accepted the Commission view and have amended or agreed to amend the terms concerned" - so it looks as if these patterns are telling us more about companies' culture than anything else.

At the greener end, while it's possible that some companies haven't thought hard enough about all the things that might go wrong, it's plausible that we've got companies that are more consumer-focussed, perhaps out of conviction, perhaps because they reckon that consumers may be relatively flighty and will leave if pushed too hard. At the redder end, we've got - well, I'm not sure. It could be just hard-nosed business, shifting as much risk as possible onto someone else, possibly on a view that most customers are relatively sticky. It could be that the company is being run by the lawyers. Or it could be that a company views consumers as "them versus us".

So it'll be an interesting market experiment to see which approach works best over the next few years. If I was currently down the redder end, I think I'd be minded to change course: competition is a multi-dimensional beast, and in competitive markets I don't think I'd like to get into the fray lagging badly on non-price dimensions like contract fairness.

As an aside, if you'd like a fascinating example of corporate culture losing sight of the customer, try this excellent article from Bloomberg earlier this year, 'United's quest to be less awful'. I especially liked this anecdote:

On Nov. 19 the airline announced it was changing the coffee it serves on its planes and in its lounges from a brand called Fresh Brew to the Italian premium roaster Illy. It was welcome news to customers and to the flight crews used to fielding complaints. It was also a tacit admission that the choice of coffee after the merger, a decision that consumed thousands of man-hours, took nearly a year, and involved everyone from [then CEO] Smisek to the airline’s head chef to the flight attendants, hadn’t worked out.