In the third week of the first Covid lockdown, April 2020, close to a thousand people signed up to a hackathon called Hack the Crisis, split into 55 teams, and spent a weekend building over video for a country that had gone quiet and frightened. (Scoop 2020) Our team picked energy hardship.
The size of that problem depends on which line you draw, and the honest thing is to say which. On the narrowest official measure, kept by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 6% of households could not afford to keep their home adequately warm in the year to June 2022, about 110,000 households. A broader academic analysis of the same data, by Dr Kimberley O’Sullivan, found at least 18% of households, roughly 360,000, unable to pay for the electricity they needed. (RNZ 2024) Whichever measure you take, the state itself is the same: an unexpected power bill forcing a real choice between heating and something else that also cannot wait. Electricity is the sharp edge of hardship because power is two things at once. It is an essential service, the thing you cannot run a home without, and it is a commercial product, sold to you for profit by a company. Hardship lives in the gap between those two facts.
Our idea was small and, we thought, kind. Call it PowerMove: a platform that let one household pass an hour of power to another that needed it. If you had a little spare, you could give it straight to someone who did not. When we said it out loud you could watch it land. It was one sentence. It fit on a slide. People typed hearts into the chat.
A coordination problem, we thought
We began from a hypothesis that felt obviously right. Donating power was a coordination problem. Plenty of people wanted to help a neighbour keep the lights on, and there was simply no way to do it. Build the way, and the goodwill already sitting there would flow. So we tested it the honest way, by talking to the people who would have to make it real, and interviewed leaders from across the electricity industry.
Honest, but late, and the order matters more than I understood that weekend. For a consumer product the riskiest assumption is usually whether anyone wants it. For a public-good idea it is almost always different: it is whether the party who can veto the whole thing will allow it. Ours rested entirely on the consent of a small set of companies whose participation was not optional, and that is a one-call test, the kind you can run before you have written a word. We ran it last, after the room had told us the idea was good, and a no on the Friday costs a phone call and a no after launch costs the launch.
The feedback was consistent, and it was not what we hoped for. Moving an hour of power between two customers was technically straightforward. Nobody doubted it could be done. What they told us, again and again, was that no power company would take part. That finding is ours alone, from one weekend of interviews; I cannot point you at a report for it, only tell you it was unanimous.
At first we read that as a money problem. There was nothing in it for the companies, no margin in helping their customers subsidise each other, so of course they were not interested. That reading was comfortable, because it let us keep our idea and blame their spreadsheets.
Not money, reputation
The comfort was the tell. The barrier was not that the numbers failed to add up. The barrier was reputational, and once I saw it I could not unsee it.
New Zealand’s power is generated and sold by a handful of large companies. In 2018 Stephen Poletti, an energy economist at the University of Auckland, estimated that the five big generators had taken about $5.4 billion in excess profits between 2010 and 2016: money charged above what a genuinely competitive market would have allowed, collected through the very bills that were pushing households into hardship in the first place. (University of Auckland 2018) It is an estimate, modelled against a hypothetical competitive market rather than read off audited accounts, and the industry disputes it. The scale is the point, not the decimal.
Now set that next to a donation box. A company that has quietly taken billions off its customers cannot then stand beside a feature that asks those same customers to donate power to one another, because the box itself says the quiet part out loud. If the market worked, why would this be needed? For those companies PowerMove was not merely unprofitable. It was a public admission, printed on a platform with their name near it, that some of their customers could not afford the thing everyone was being overcharged for. It was bad public relations of the most dangerous kind, the kind that also happens to be true.
A safe idea is not the same as a good one
That reframed the whole project, and not flatteringly. We had treated energy hardship as a failure of generosity. In that story the problem is that people are not kind enough, or connected enough, to help each other, and the fix is a clever app that lets them. It is a comfortable story, because it puts the entire burden of the solution on households and asks nothing at all of the companies in the middle. That is exactly why it felt safe. It is also why it was wrong.
Hardship was not sitting there because New Zealanders lacked goodwill. It was sitting there alongside billions in estimated excess profit, tied to it by the same monthly bill, held in place by market settings that let that much profit and that much hardship exist at one address. Our donation box would have dressed a design problem up as a charity problem, and taken the pressure off the only parties with the power to change it.
Where it should have gone
If I were to build it again, I would narrow it hard, to surplus solar: a platform that let households with panels donate or sell the power they do not use, and choose where that value went. It is a smaller and more honest idea. It moves real surplus rather than asking the squeezed to give, and it routes around the gatekeepers instead of asking them for a permission they will never grant.
Some of our kindest-looking ideas are kind precisely because they leave the powerful untouched. When a fix asks everything of the people already paying the price and nothing of the people setting it, that is worth noticing before you build, on the Friday, not after the interviews. A donation box in a captured market is not generosity. It is cover.