The Green Party has put a publicly owned electricity company at the centre of its 2026 election campaign, promising $980 million over four years to set up an entity it calls Kiwipower and a zero-interest loan scheme to get solar panels and batteries onto tens of thousands of homes.
Co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson launched the policy at the Dunedin Gasworks Museum on Monday, a site that generated the city’s gas supply for more than a century before closing in 1987. The choice of venue was not subtle. The Greens argue that the electricity system New Zealand built in public hands has been handed to a small group of large companies, and that the state needs to come back in as a builder rather than only a regulator.
Under the plan, Kiwipower would start with $100 million a year for operating costs and $142 million a year for new investment. Its job would not be to compete for household customers against the existing retailers. Instead it would target what the party describes as the gap in the market, which is firming capacity, the backup generation that has to be available when the hydro lakes run low or the wind stops blowing. That would mean investment in geothermal, batteries, demand response, biomass and pumped hydro. Kiwipower would also contract capacity from the large generators and on-sell it to independent retailers and generators at what the Greens call fair, affordable and transparent prices.
That last piece is aimed squarely at the structural complaint that has dogged the electricity market for years. Four companies, Contact, Genesis, Mercury and Meridian, both generate power and sell it to households, and they control the large majority of generation. Independent retailers have long argued they cannot get hedge contracts on terms that let them compete. The Greens say Kiwipower would break that grip by becoming a supplier of last resort for the smaller players.
The second half of the policy is aimed at households. The party is promising zero-interest loans for solar panels and home batteries, available to what it says would be up to 90 percent of homeowners. The loans would be run through a structure with central government holding a fifth of the ownership and participating councils and the Local Government Funding Agency holding the rest, which the Greens say would let the scheme borrow at rates around two to two and a half percentage points below a typical mortgage. Government would then subsidise the remaining interest down to zero. The party has costed that at roughly $421 million in operating spending over four years.
Alongside it sits $460 million to put solar on public housing, with the party saying panels would go on more than half of state homes within four years, around 40,000 properties. There is $200 million for community-owned renewable projects, which the Greens say would be funded by reallocating existing fossil fuel subsidies, and $80 million for renewable energy in Māori housing. The party also wants to legalise plug-in solar, the small panels that plug straight into a wall socket and are common in Germany but not currently permitted here, give renters a right to install solar, and set fairer prices for the power households export back to the grid. The whole package is to be paid for out of the party’s proposed tax on very high wealth.
Swarbrick framed the announcement around cost, saying “200,000 households are unable to afford to heat their homes while four big power companies control over 85 percent”. She said decades of privatisation had driven up bills and reduced the control New Zealanders have over their own energy system.
“A warm, dry home powered by clean energy should be within everyone’s reach. That is the country we can build, and this is how we do it,” she said.
The households the policy is trying to reach are largely defined by income and tenure rather than anything else. Energy hardship in New Zealand concentrates among low-income renters in older, poorly insulated housing stock, which is also the group least able to make the upfront investment that solar requires and least able to authorise it, since they do not own the roof. That is why the renters’ right to install and the public housing rollout matter more to the policy’s reach than the loan scheme does, because a zero-interest loan is only useful to someone who owns a house and can service it.
The response from the right of the political spectrum was immediate. ACT energy spokesperson Simon Court said the plan “ignores reality and would leave everyday Kiwis poorer”, arguing that renewables cannot hold the system together without gas and thermal backup and that state intervention would frighten off the private investment needed to build new generation.
“You don’t solve an electricity shortage by scaring away the people willing to build the generation,” Court said. “If the Greens get their way, New Zealand will end up running out of power.”
The announcement lands a day after NZ First went the other direction at its own campaign launch in Manukau, where leader Winston Peters pledged $1 billion for a national survey of offshore oil, gas, geothermal and carbon storage prospects. Peters said New Zealand was “totally dependent on international supply lines of oil and gas” and put the odds of a major commercial discovery at “well above 90 percent”. Two weekends into the campaign, energy has emerged as one of the clearest dividing lines on offer.
The Government has taken a third route. Its answer has been rule changes rather than ownership, with the Electricity Authority introducing non-discrimination rules from 1 July that stop the four large gentailers offering their own retail arms better wholesale terms than they offer independent competitors, along with a review of the futures market and moves on hedge market access. Critics on both the business and opposition sides have called those reforms weak. Whether households notice them on a power bill before 7 November is another question entirely.
Not sure where any of this leaves your own vote? Our voting tool matches your views on energy, tax and the rest against what the parties are actually promising.
What do you make of a state-owned power company? Would you take a zero-interest loan for solar, and does it reach the households that need it most? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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