When the Timaru Herald published an article entitled Mercury Energy goes knocking for business on Saturday the 3rd of July, I took interest. There were two main problems with the story. Firstly they stated that Mercury Energy was a new entrant to the South Canterbury market and secondly they published some market share figures for South Canterbury showing TrustPower as having the largest proportion, followed by Meridian Energy.
So I surfed to the Electricity Commission's web site to check the figures for myself. My investigations led me to sending the following letter to the Timaru Herald for publishing:
I would question the accuracy of the electricity retailer market share percentages that were published in the article about Mercury Energy on the front page of Saturday's Timaru Herald.
The Electricity Commission oversees New Zealand's electricity market and as part of their role, they publish monthly statistics on customers (ICPs) by Network Supply Point (NSP). The figures for May show Contact Energy as having the bulk of the ICPs in South Canterbury, with 20,774 out of a total of 30,713 ICPs. In terms of percentage Contact has 68, TrustPower has 19, Meridian has 8, Genesis has 4 and Mercury has 1 percent.
Mercury is not a new entrant to the South Canterbury market as suggested in the article either. The Electricity Commission's figures date back to the start of 2000. At that time Mercury had one ICP in South Canterbury. The figures for May show that they now have 223.
The Timaru Herald have had well over a week to either publish the letter or to publish a correction to their story, but for reasons unknown they have failed to do either. The Timaru Herald often contains spelling mistakes and grammatical errors (and so does this web site). I have no problems with that. But it is totally unacceptable if they report grossly inaccurate figures and take no action to correct them when advised.
Since I've got the historical data back to 2000 available, I thought it might make a nice chart:
And then the National Figures:
There are two interesting points with the national data. First, the rise of Mercury Energy is very impressive and second, that TrustPower and Meridian Energy have flatlined.
Data sourced from: The Electricity Commission
Update: After lodging a formal complaint, the Timaru Herald took another look at their article and realised that they had published the wrong figures. They have since published a correction in the paper.
I'd also note that the Timaru Herald is a member of the New Zealand Press Council, which is an "industry self-regulatory body and provides an independent forum for resolving complaints involving the press". Their aim is to maintain "high standards of accuracy, fairness and balance and public faith in those standards". They have guidelines for making a complaint and the principles that their members should uphold on their web site:
www.presscouncil.org.nz