A free hour,
every single day.
Spent on nothing.
The Hour of Power is the best idea in New Zealand retail energy, and it is the one thing on your site that asks the customer to do the work. You give them a free hour a day and leave them to figure out when it should be and what to run in it. This is a concept for closing that gap.
“Cheaper off-peak power, no contracts, plus our famous free Hour of Power every day.”
Electric Kiwi · electrickiwi.co.nz, July 2026The hour nobody planned for
The free hour arrives. The dishwasher is not loaded, nobody thought about the dryer, the car is already plugged in on a full charge, and the hour passes at roughly the value of a phone charger. Multiply that by every day of a year and the best feature on the plan quietly underperforms itself.
You have won Canstar Most Satisfied Customers for Bundled Utilities four years running, which means the relationship is already there. The unfinished part is not trust, it is that the free hour only pays off for the customers organised enough to plan around it.
What happens now
A generous mechanic that rewards admin. The customers who plan get the value; everyone else gets the idea of it.
What it costs
Your best differentiator gets judged on the version of it people actually experience, which is the unplanned one.
What the concept does
Works out when their hour should sit and what is worth running in it, and stops. They choose the hour.
Every switch moment, one pattern.
Each of these is a moment your customer already spends with you. Each can carry what the phone above shows: watch the work, earn the wait, answer one thing.
Be relevant — right thing, right moment · Be respectful — short, skippable, quiet by design · Be measurable — real impact, on the record · Be Aotearoa — built here, for how Kiwis actually wait
Every wait in a power switch
Six moments where a power customer is left waiting on someone else, and what each wait could hand back instead.
A straight answer to the only question that matters, before anyone signs anything.
You can watch the switch move instead of assuming it has stalled.
The last loose end of the old plan gets closed off without you chasing it.
The best hour of the day gets used, without anyone having to remember it.
You know it is not your fuse box, and you know someone already has it in hand.
The bill stops being a surprise, because you were told while you could still do something.
Four steps, every time.
- The signalSomething in your own systems says a person is now waiting, and roughly how long for.
- The predictionHow long this one will really take — not the average, this one.
- The valueSomething worth their attention goes into that window: an answer, a credit, a thing prepared while they wait.
- The exchangeThey get value. You get a customer who stayed, and one optional answer you have always wanted.
This is the reward layer, running for real on this page. Drag to scratch it. Nothing is collected, nothing is sent — it is here so the idea is something you do, not something you read.
US retailers lose an estimated $37.7 billion a year to customers who abandon because of long queues, split roughly $15.8b to competitors and $21.9b abandoned outright (Adyen with 451 Research). The New York State Department of Labor reported a 48% reduction in hang-ups after introducing virtual queuing. Theme parks moving to virtual queues reported a 36% lift in per-capita spending, because guests spent the wait somewhere that sold something. A Seattle-Tacoma Airport study found 63% of passengers said they shopped or ate more because they saved time in the security queue.
Every figure on this page carries its source. Overseas figures are shown as overseas figures — we have not found a published New Zealand equivalent, and we will not invent one.
One free hour. Four different houses.
The same mechanic, planned four ways. Nothing here switches an appliance on, moves anyone onto a different plan, or changes a billing date — every output stops at a suggestion the customer sets themselves.
A template sends the same thing to everyone and changes the name. What matters here is the case that should get something different — or nothing at all.
The rules beside each draft are placeholders. A pilot replaces them with your actual policies. We have not seen those, and this concept does not guess at them.
The checks that run before any suggestion is sent
Energy is a household essential, so the difference between a helpful tip and a harmful one is whether anything was listening first.
Drafts are held against the Fair Trading Act 1986, the Electricity Authority’s Consumer Care Obligations, the Privacy Act 2020, and the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007.
Press run to see what it catches — and what it refuses to produce at all.
One room. Your people, your agents, every action on the record.
Every concept on this page would run inside a private room like this: your team and the agents in the same space, drafts appearing with receipts, a named person saying yes. It runs on infrastructure you approve — and what is said in the room stays in it.
receipt sources: your rate card · rules: yours · held for approval
Client information stays in your room. Six months later, “where did this come from?” is one line, not a search.
Yours
Runs where you approve — your own room, your own record. Nothing in it leaves it.
On the record
Every agent action lands as a line a person can read — not a log only a vendor can open.
People decide
Drafts wait for a named person. The room shows who said yes, and when.
This panel is a concept picture, not a live room — a pilot stands up the real one, on infrastructure you approve.
The batch, before anything sends
Illustrative and fictional. No production access is requested by this concept.
| Account | Count | Prepared | Waiting on | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Empty afternoons, hour mis-placed | — | New slot suggested, nothing moved | Customer to set it | Awaiting customer |
| EV charging longer than an hour | — | Hour placed against the cycle | Customer to set it | Awaiting customer |
| Joined inside a fortnight | — | Two questions, default offered | CX sign-off | Awaiting approval |
| Usage falling in cold weather | — | Nothing drafted | A named person | Held — no draft |
| Medically dependent flag | — | Nothing drafted | A named person | Held — no draft |
| Smart meter data incomplete | — | Suggestion held | Meter data | Parked |
Counts are deliberately blank. This concept has no Electric Kiwi data and does not estimate how many accounts anything affects.
Every draft carries its own working.
Not a log somebody has to go and find. The provenance travels with the work — what it read, which rules it held, who must approve it, and what it refused to do.
This matters most on the day someone asks why it said what it said.
- Artefact
- Hour-of-Power placement suggestion — empty afternoons
- Read
- Published plan and Hour of Power facts from electrickiwi.co.nz · account fields: half-hourly usage shape, medical-dependency flag, tenure. No payment data. No device or charger telemetry.
- Rules held
- Fair Trading Act 1986 · Electricity Authority Consumer Care Obligations · Privacy Act 2020 · Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007
- Refused
- No forward saving was projected. Nothing was switched, scheduled or moved. No suggestion was drafted for an account showing rationing or carrying a medical-dependency flag. No plan switch was recommended.
- Approver
- A named person. Unsent until then.
- Prepared
- —
- Reference
- —
What this will never do
It does not send. It prepares, and a named person sends. It does not publish to any channel, commit spend, move money, or make a decision that belongs to a person. It does not pretend to be a person — every draft says it was prepared by a machine and approved by a human.
No production access is requested by this concept.
Scope
One moment: Hour of Power placement for opted-in accounts with at least a fortnight of usage. Six weeks. Not pricing, not plan switching, not appliance control, not the billing engine.
Access
Your published plan facts, and the field names for half-hourly usage shape, medical-dependency flag and account tenure. No payment data. No device telemetry. No account records leave your systems.
Scorecard
Suggestions where the customer actually moved their hour. Held cases a person agreed should have been held. Contact-centre calls the suggestion avoided or caused. And whether a CX lead would send the hardship-held list to themselves as a to-do.
Fail any line of the scorecard and we change the design or stop.
What a pilot actually asks of you.
Written out in full, because the honest version of this is short and most of it is your time, not your money.
One named person
The approver. Every draft stops with them and nothing reaches a customer until they say so. Expect about two hours a week — reading drafts, not managing a project.
One situation, not the business
One moment: Hour of Power placement for opted-in accounts with at least a fortnight of usage. Six weeks. Not pricing, not plan switching, not appliance control, not the billing engine.
Read-only access, nothing that writes
Your published plan facts, and the field names for half-hourly usage shape, medical-dependency flag and account tenure. No payment data. No device telemetry. No account records leave your systems. No production credentials, no write permissions, no access to anything the pilot does not need.
Your actual rules
The policies, limits and words the drafts must be held against. Every rule on this page is a placeholder standing in for yours. An afternoon with whoever owns them is usually enough.
Six weeks, then a real decision
Scored on: Suggestions where the customer actually moved their hour. Held cases a person agreed should have been held. Contact-centre calls the suggestion avoided or caused. And whether a CX lead would send the hardship-held list to themselves as a to-do. Fail any line of that and we change the design or stop. You keep everything drafted either way.
A fixed fee, agreed in writing first
No number is published on this page, because it depends on which situation you pick. Whatever it is, it is agreed before any work starts and it does not move.
Run the pilot.
Say yes to the six weeks above, and add anything you would change first. Nothing here is fixed — most pilots move a line or two before they start, and the notes below are how that happens.
Opens your mail app to assembl@assembl.co.nz with your notes in it. Nothing is collected by this page.
- Six weeks, one situation, scored against a written line
- Read-only access, nothing production
- A named approver — nothing sends without them
- A fixed fee, agreed in writing before anything starts
- Stop any time. You keep what was drafted
Pick a verb.
Not “book a demo”. Any of these is a real next step, and the last one is a perfectly good answer.
What is the one constraint we have got wrong?
Every concept is built from the outside. There is always something about how Electric Kiwi actually runs that we could not see. One line is enough.
Opens your mail app to assembl@assembl.co.nz. Nothing is collected by this page.