The Green Party has released its energy policy, built around a new publicly-owned entity called KiwiPower that would invest in renewable energy. The plan is backed by $980 million over four years, funded by the party's proposed wealth tax on the super-rich.

Co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson launched the plan at the Dunedin Gasworks Museum on Monday. The museum sits on the site of the country's first and last coal gas manufacturing plant. Swarbrick told the launch the venue was deliberate: gas belongs in a museum rather than in modern policy (RNZ).

KiwiPower would receive $100 million per year for operating costs and $142 million per year for new investment. Swarbrick linked the funding to the Greens' wider tax agenda, saying it would make corporations and the super-rich pay their fair share through proposed wealth, corporate, and inheritance taxes.

Swarbrick said 200,000 households cannot afford to heat their homes, while four big power companies control more than 85 percent of the market. The plan addresses that concentration through public investment rather than by regulating prices directly. However, the policy does include a pricing reform: households and businesses with solar panels would receive a fair price for electricity they export back to the grid.

The solar access package covers several areas. Zero-interest clean energy loans would be available to install solar and batteries for up to 90 percent of homeowners. Plug-in solar — panels you can plug into a standard wall socket without a full installation — would be legalised. Renters would gain the right to install solar and could not be unreasonably blocked by landlords. Solar would be installed on more than half of all public housing within four years, at a cost of $460 million.

The Warm Up New Zealand / Warmer Kiwi Homes government grant programme would be expanded significantly. The Greens propose $969.8 million over four years to fund 50,000 upgrades under the scheme, which helps homeowners insulate and heat their homes.

A $200 million allocation for community energy projects would be funded by redirecting subsidies currently given to fossil fuel companies. A further $80 million would go to renewable energy for Māori housing. Davidson said tangata whenua are two to three times more likely to face energy hardship, describing the ring-fenced funding as a targeted response to that gap.

The total cost across the policy is large. KiwiPower's $980 million, public housing solar at $460 million, Warmer Kiwi Homes at $969.8 million, community energy at $200 million, and Māori housing renewables at $80 million together exceed $2.6 billion over four years. All of it depends on the Greens' proposed tax revenue actually materialising.

The broader context here is that the Greens are presenting KiwiPower as both an economic policy tool and a cost-of-living measure. The decision to anchor the plan in a publicly-owned energy investor, rather than in changes to existing rules and regulations, is a shift from the incremental approach that has dominated energy policy in recent terms. The last major structural change to electricity ownership came under the fourth Labour government's reform agenda in the 1980s. Since then, governments have largely worked within that market framework rather than proposing new public entities. Whether a future government would agree to creating a new state-owned energy investor, and whether the proposed tax base could sustain the spending, are the questions that will follow this policy into any coalition negotiation.

The venue, the framing, and the scale of the commitment together suggest a party positioning energy as a frontline election issue. Swarbrick's line about gas belonging in a museum is doing a lot of work: it ties the energy transition to the fossil fuel phase-out debate while casting the Greens as the party willing to spend publicly to get there. The choice to ring-fence $80 million for Māori housing and to lift renters' solar rights signals the party is targeting energy hardship as an equity issue, not just a climate one. How much of this survives contact with a potential coalition partner, or with Treasury scrutiny of the revenue assumptions, is the practical test ahead.