Aurora Energy to improve disclosure

The Commerce Commission has announced a suite of enhanced information disclosure (ID) requirements on Aurora Energy.

The commission says this is to give consumers and other stakeholders greater visibility of what Aurora is doing to address safety and reliability issues on its network under a customised price-quality path (CPP) approved in March this year.

When the commission agreed in March to a CPP allowing Aurora to recover up to $563.4 million from its consumers over five years to repair, upgrade, maintain and operate its network, it was clear that enhanced ID requirements would be an important part of the package, associate commissioner John Crawford says.

“We have consulted extensively with Aurora, its consumers and other stakeholders over the last 18 months and it is clear that Aurora needs to improve its relationships with its community,” he says.

“The suite of measures we are putting in place will provide a framework for Aurora to lift engagement and show consumers, other stakeholders and us as regulator that it is doing what it committed to in the CPP.

“We will continue to monitor Aurora’s compliance with the information disclosure regime and the commitments it made under the CPP but the onus is now on Aurora to improve its engagement in line with these requirements and fix its network problems. We have already seen some positive steps towards this.”

Aurora will be required to develop a suite of forward-looking plans by March 31, 2022 that set out its plans for spending on the network throughout the CPP period as well as how it will improve processes, performance and safety.

These include a development plan setting out how it aims to improve its processes in a range of areas important to consumers, including monitoring voltage quality, planned outages and asset management practices.

The three key plans must be presented in each of Aurora Energy’s three major pricing regions – Dunedin, Central Otago and Wanaka, and Queenstown – by May 31, 2022, the commission says.

Progress against the plans must be made public by August 31 each year via an Annual Delivery Report (ADR), which must then be presented in public meetings in each of the three pricing regions before the end of October.

An interim ADR will be required in 2022 given that the forward-looking plans will only have been in place a few months.

The company will also need to publish information every March to help consumers understand how their prices are set.

Crawford says Aurora is also required to commission independent experts to review and report on its progress against its plans and the quality of its engagement by March 1, 2024.

“Aurora will then need to publicly demonstrate how it intends to refine its plans in response to recommendations from these mid-period reviews and, if necessary, correct its course for the second half of the CPP period.”