$25bn Assets of the Electricity Distribution Businesses

The Commerce Commission is in the process of the 2025 reset of the electricity default price-quality path in a time of uncertainty and high-inflation. The Commission tasked Principal Economics to provide a solution for dealing with supply chain and economic uncertainty for regulating $25 billion of assets of the electricity distribution businesses over the DPP4 (2025-2030) period. For that work, we used a combination of methods, including stakeholder engagement, CGE analysis (for the impact of climate policy on cost categories), econometric analysis and forecasting. The work included significant stakeholder engagement and inputs from the electricity distribution businesses from their submissions (to the Commission). The outputs are adopted in the Commission’s latest decision and are available here.

Review of Housing and Business Development Capacity Assessments

The Ministry for the Environment (MfE) appointed Principal Economics to review the Housing and Business Development Capacity Assessments HBAs). Our review included all councils’ HBAs, except for Rotorua and Wellington, which were not available at the time of this review. The focus of our review was on the requirements of the National Policy Statement on Urban Development 2020 (NPS-UD 2020). The outcome of our review indicates the areas of improvement for the next round of HBAs both for the councils and for the MfE and HUD (the ministries).

Reviews that have been published online can be found below:

Chorus’s base capital and operating expenditure

We provided advice on the cost escalation indices relevant to Chorus’s cost categories, including network Operating Expense (OPEX), IT Capital Expense (CAPEX), network electronics, greenfield expansion, poles CAPEX, network sustain, building and services, physical network, site lease and fibre lease. The outputs were used for Chorus’s RPE1 submission. Our report was informed by the information provided by engineers and the stakeholders on the composition of cost factors. We provided advice on the available data and methodologies to provide robust projections and forecasts of the impact of COVID-19 disruption. This was particularly a challenging project because this was the first submission of Chorus and identifying the precise indices for predicting cost factors was critical.