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.
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.
Pick a verb.
Not “book a demo”. Any of these is a real next step, and the third 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.