An open letter to Waikato power consumers
Don't you think surplus profit should come back to you?
At its peak, the annual Power Discount returned 4–6 weeks of electricity costs to every household and business in the region. Today it's been diluted, with more of your money being spent elsewhere. We think it's worth talking about why.
01 · Orientation
Most Waikato households don't have a clear picture of how the WEL Energy Trust and WEL Networks fit together. They're closely connected but they do very different jobs. Get this distinction right and the rest of the page makes sense.
The owner
The WEL Energy Trust is a community trust formed in 1993 that holds 100% of WEL Networks shares on behalf of the people it serves. It is governed by seven trustees, publicly elected every three years by power consumers in the region.
The Trust decides what happens to the profit its company makes: keep it invested, gift it as grants, or return it to consumers as power-bill discounts.
The lines company
WEL Networks is a power lines company. It owns and maintains the poles, cables, transformers and substations that deliver electricity across the region, from Hamilton, west to Raglan and north to Te Kauwhata.
It's a monopoly. If you live in the region, your electricity comes through its lines, and you pay a portion of your bill towards running them. There is no opt-out.
02 · The mechanism
Lines companies don't bill you directly. WEL Networks calculates a tariff for every connection in its region and asks your chosen power retailer to collect it on its behalf as part of your monthly power bill. The retailer passes that money through to WEL Networks.
That's the bit that matters: lines charges aren't optional. You can switch power retailer tomorrow morning and you will still be paying WEL Networks, because nobody else owns the lines that deliver electricity to your house.
03 · The profit
It needs to. To keep a safe, reliable lines network running, the company must bring in enough money to cover its costs and earn a reasonable return. But because it's a monopoly, its tariffs and profits are watched by both the Commerce Commission and the elected Trustees of the WEL Energy Trust.
The structure
Regulated monopoly
There is no competing lines company. Every connection in the region pays through their power bill, whichever retailer they're with.
Independent oversight
Commerce Commission
As New Zealand's competition regulator, it monitors the tariffs and profits of regulated lines monopolies including WEL Networks.
Community oversight
Elected Trustees
Seven trustees of the WEL Energy Trust, publicly elected by power consumers in the region every three years.
04 · The fork in the road
Before any income reaches the WEL Energy Trust, WEL Networks first retains a portion for capital investment in the network: substations, line upgrades, weather hardening. Whatever's left flows up to the Trust, and the Trustees have three options for how to use it.
The founding intent · 2002
The original Discount Scheme was introduced to satisfy the wishes of the voters at the time, who agreed that WEL Networks profits should be returned to the consumer.Background · Your Discounts Team
05 · The history
The discount scheme has been on a quiet 20-year journey: created, diluted, discontinued, reinstated, and partly redirected again. Here are the milestones that matter.
Trustees and voters decide that WEL Networks profits should be returned directly to the people who pay the lines charges. A discount lands on every consumer's power bill once a year, usually around April or May.
At its high-water mark, the annual discount was worth roughly four to six weeks of total electricity spend per household. For most families, the cheque-in-the-mail moment was unmissable.
Over more than a decade, the discount was steadily reduced as more of the profit was redirected toward grant funding. In 2019 it was discontinued altogether by Trustees in favour of more grant funding.
A team of four trustees standing on a pro-discount platform, campaigning then under the name Bring Back Discounts, today known as Your Discounts Team, wins a majority on the Trust. Within their term they reinstate the annual Power Discount.
Three of the four Your Discounts Team trustees are re-elected, but they no longer hold the majority. The new majority of trustees prioritises increasing grants funding through higher company dividends.
Across the three-year term, more than $16.5 million of money first paid by households as part of their power bills has been channelled into increased grant funding rather than returned as a discount.
06 · The argument
This isn't an argument against the Trust, against grants, or against community investment. It's an argument about which pot grants should come from. Three reasons.
Try not paying your power bill and see what happens. Lines charges are not a donation. They're a charge every household and business in the region must pay. Compulsory money should be returned to the people who paid it before being redirected to causes someone else has chosen.
The WEL Energy Trust Deed specifically states that the community the Trust serves is all persons who reside in the region, not just community organisations. The 100,000+ households on the network are the foundational community the Trust was set up to serve. "Community investment" sometimes ends up funding a relatively small set of organisations chosen by the Trust, but the Deed's definition is broader than that.
Discounts aren't taxed and they return GST to residential customers. The same dollar of profit, distributed as a discount instead of a grant, delivers up to $1.60 in the household's pocket. It's a more efficient way to get the money home.
$1 of profit distributed as a grant returns $1 to the recipient.
The same dollar, returned as a power-bill discount, can deliver up to $1.60 back to a residential household once GST is unwound.
07 · The fair hearing
▍ Where we agree
Community grants from the Trust have supported a wide range of organisations across the region for many years, and we support continued grant funding from the Trust. None of that is in dispute.
What we disagree with is the source. The WEL Energy Trust holds well over $100 million in other investments: equity and share-market funds, plus WEL Networks subsidiaries that aren't part of the regulated lines monopoly. Combined, these can comfortably support a significant level of community grants.
The question we'd like the Waikato to consider is simple: should grants be paid from the Trust's investment income, or from your power bill? We think the former.
▍ A note on this page
Trustees of the WEL Energy Trust are elected by power consumers in the region every three years. The next triennial Trustee Election is in June 2026, and the only people who can change any of this are the people whose money is being talked about. Yours.
08 · Questions
No. We support continued grant funding from the WEL Energy Trust. We just don’t think compulsory power-bill money is the right source. The Trust holds over $100M in other investments that can fund grants without redirecting money from household power bills.
Because that’s what the trustees did, and they did it within their elected mandate. We disagree with the decision, not the legitimacy of those who made it. The point of this page is to make the trade-off visible to the people whose money it was, and to encourage participation in the next Trust election.
Every consumer connected to WEL Networks receives it once a year, typically around April or May, as a credit against their power bill, applied via their power retailer. You don’t need to apply for it; if you pay lines charges, the discount comes back to you.
The lines charge must cover the cost of running the network plus a regulated profit margin. It’s set within rules monitored by the Commerce Commission, and it’s important that it is a fair reflection of what network costs would be if the business was owned by someone else.
The discount works differently: it’s a portion of the profit that the Trust chooses to give back to consumers after the fact, rather than a change to the price upfront.
Seven trustees are publicly elected to the WEL Energy Trust every three years. The current trustees and election information are published at welenergytrust.co.nz. The next triennial Trustee Election is in June 2026.
Your Discounts Team, a group of Waikato consumers including current and former trustees, who advocate for returning WEL Networks profits to households as power-bill discounts. The views on this page are ours; they don’t represent the official position of the WEL Energy Trust as a whole or WEL Networks Ltd. Sources for every figure used are listed below.
09 · Sources
We've kept this list short on purpose. If you'd like to read the full picture, all the underlying material is publicly available.