What our members say

These are references from PowerHub members, in their own words. We asked each of them the same three things: why they joined, how it has gone so far, and how they plan to manage the dry-year risk. Nothing here is a promise about what your bill will do; every home is different, which is why we start with a free bill analysis.

Tim from Auckland

EV early adopter · on wholesale pricing without a battery, for now · September 2026

Why I joined

We were coming off a long, fixed-price contract with a large power retailer who we’d been with for roughly a decade. As a very early EV adopter, we’d had access to some very good rates to encourage overnight charging, from both of our last electricity retailers, so we had already gotten used to shifting our large power use into off-peak times. That, plus our fixed rates being 3-years old, meant our power bills had remained reasonable even as everyone around us was losing their mind due to the excessive and continuous price rises.

Unfortunately, it also meant, when we came to renew, the new rates offered were well over 40% higher than what we’d been on! I knew something like that was coming, so I’d been shopping around for a while and, being a bit of a nerd, I’d already been looking into energy arbitrage via DIY and commercial batteries (our bitsy roof is not well suited to solar), and it was clear that - if you can handle the risk - wholesale rates were the way to do that. In that respect, PowerHub’s launch came at an excellent time, and we only were stuck with around 3 weeks of those expensive new rates before we could migrate.

I should add, Sophia and the team are also clearly energy nerds themselves, which gave me some confidence that they had a similar mindset, to ‘hack’ the energy market, that I was bringing!

My experience so far

Good. PowerHub are clearly a small, start-up team, but they are making it work. It’s early days, but I’ve already calculated a $180 saving (compared to the rates I had been offered), so I’m feeling good about that. I’m conscious of the wildly fluctuating wholesale rates (I literally built a dashboard to track them!), and confess I did turn off the heat pump for an hour when the wholesale prices briefly hit dollars/kWh early in August, but we were already used to heating water, charging cars, and running things like dishwashers and dryers in off-peak times. Having access to true wholesale pricing just means we now have more off-peak times available.

How I intend to manage the dry-year risk

We accept the risk is there. Our usage doesn’t (yet) justify a battery, even though that undoubtedly would help in that situation, but we are conscious of the live rates (via my dashboard). Of course, as Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”, and I know extreme power bills were a big factor in why the last round of wholesale power resellers, like Flick, ran into problems a few years back. My sense is that, while our energy sector has gotten more expensive overall, they have also become more cognisant about the risk and, especially with big new loads that require industrial dependability - like mega data centres - coming online, I’m hoping both political and customer pressure will ensure appropriate firming infrastructure continues to be installed, to reduce the extremity of that risk.

- Tim