Manawa Energy
Manawa Energy limited is a New Zealand electricity generation company that offers bespoke electricity products to commercial and industrial customers across New Zealand. Manawa energy currently operate 26 power schemes from the Bay of Plenty in the north, to Otago in the south.
The company is listed on the New Zealand stock exchange, but its ownership structure is dominated by its two major shareholders: Infratil which owns 51.0% and the Tauranga Energy Consumer Trust which owns 26.8%. The remaining 22.2% is widely held.
Mercury NZ Limited acquired Trustpower Limited’s retail business for the final acquisition price of $467 million. The acquisition will double Mercury’s total customer connections. Trustpower’s retail business sells electricity, gas, fixed and wireless broadband, and mobile phone services, totalling approximately 416,000 connections. The combined business will have approximately 787,000 connections creating New Zealand’s leading multi-product utilities retail business. Mercury Chief Executive Vince Hawksworth says that Mercury and Trustpower customers will continue to receive the same high standard of service they’ve known from both retail brands.
Manawa Energy was acquired by Contact Energy in July 2025.
History
Tauranga city
In 1913, the Tauranga Borough Council applied to the Department of Lands to have the Omanawa Falls vested in their body corporate for the purposes of water power generation. They also applied under section 268 of the Public Works Act 1908 for a licence to generate electricity.In October 1914, the Public Works Department gave its approval for water to be taken from the Omanawa River to generate electricity and circulate it throughout the borough and surrounding area.
With plans underway to build its new Omanawa Falls Power Station the Tauranga Borough Council established on 5 October 1914 a municipal electricity department to market and distribute the electricity that would be produced by the new station. Its supply area ranged from the causeway bridges leading through the town, 17th Avenue in the south to Sulphur Point in the north, a total of 210 square miles.
In 1915 the borough council hired Lloyd Mandeno as its electrical engineer, with responsibility not only for building the distribution system that will take power from the new power station but also to convince the population of 1,540 to give up their candles, kerosene lamps and town gas for the new untried electricity.
By 1924 68 homes out of the 700 in the borough were using electric cooking.
Lloyd Mandeno was made chief electrical engineer in 1917.
Local citizen R. S. Ready was so sure of the advantages of electricity that he built on 5th Avenue the first house in New Zealand that relied solely on electricity. Mandeno designed a hot water cylinder for the house, that was built from galvanized iron insulated with 150 mm of pumice. Within four years the council had expanded its reticulation to supply rural areas as far as Gate Pa, Otumoetai, Papamoa and Oropi.
By 1923 the department had 845 customers generating a revenue of £10,470.
In 1921 Lloyd Mandeno undertook some investigations and proposed that the borough consider building a new power station using the head generated by fall on the Wairoa River. With demand increasing the borough council agreed to build what became the McLaren Falls power station. This began generating on 25 June 1925.
The falls and the power station were to named after a couple who operated a cookhouse during construction and whose son had been killed in World War I.
In addition to his duties as an employee of the Tauranga electricity department, Mandeno was also a consultant to Te Puke Town Board and the newly constituted Tauranga Power Board. In 1925 Mandeno resigned after being accused of a conflict of interest by Tauranga's Mayor, Bradshaw Dive. He was replaced by Claude W. Boak as electrical and general engineer.
By 1928 the department had installed 232 water heaters and 120 electric stoves and was supplying 848 customers with a revenue of £22,116.
With demand still continuing to increased through the 1930 the combined output of Omanawa Falls and McLaren Falls was proving insufficient. As a result, the electricity department was forced to arrange with the SHD to take supply from its Aongatete and Te Puke. In 1962 the department began using underground cabling systems in new subdivisions.
In the same decade the department decided to proceed with construction of two new power stations that utilised the waters of the Mangapapa and Wairoa Rivers, which had been designed by consultants Mandeno Chitty & Bell in whom Lloyd Mandeno was a principal. Approval to proceed was granted by the New Zealand government in 1963 continual upon the station's output being equally shared with the Tauranga Electric Power Board. As a result, the Tauranga Joint Generation Committee was established in 1965 to develop, control and sell electricity generation. As a result of this initiative the original two planned stations, the Lloyd Mandeno Power Station was commissioned in 1972, and the Ruahihi Power Station in 1981. In between these two dates an additional station, the Lower Mangapapa Power Station had been commissioned in April 1979. All three stations were operated as part of the Kaimai hydro power scheme.
By 1981 the Tauranga Joint Generation Committee was making a profit of NZ$1.29 million and had 231 employees.
In 1989 the McLaren Falls Power Station was decommissioned.
Following the introduction of the Energy Companies Act in 1992, after consulting with local citizens the Tauranga City Council transferred the assets of its electricity department to the newly established Tauranga Electricity Ltd. The majority shareholder in the new company was the council owned Tauranga Civic Holdings Ltd, which held 5,099,994 shares with the remaining six shares in the company held by the public. In June 1993 Tauranga Civic Holdings Ltd took full control. By that year the company had 5,576 customers.
Tauranga Electric Power Board
Using the provisions of the Electric Power Boards Act of 1918 proposals were put to create a power board to supply the rural areas of the Bay of Plenty. As a result, the Tauranga Electric Power Board was established and held its first meeting on 13 September 1923. The following year a poll of ratepayers in the board's area which covered 667 square miles, including the towns of Katikati, Mt Maunganui and Te Puke the board raised a loan of £110,000 to construct its distribution system. Rather than build its own power stations the board arranged to obtain its electricity from the Electricity Department of the Tauranga Borough Council.Following his resignation from Tauranga Borough Council Lloyd Mandeno took up a position as general manager of the Tauranga Electric Power Board in January 1926. He was only in the position until he resigned on 25 May of that year, leaving the position in August, to go into private practice in Auckland. However the board retained him as their consulting engineer on an annual retaining fee of £250 plus travelling expenses, a position he retained until 1929. While involved with the power board he invented, developed and introduced into service the single wire earth return reticulation system. This allowed the board to reduce the cost of distributing electricity across its predominantly rural customer base.
In response to the State Hydro-Electric Department, introducing charging for peak demand the power board in 1952 introduced what is believed to have been the world's first automatic load control system. That same year the power board also began manufacturing pre-stressed concrete power poles. It is believed that it was one of the first power boards to do this in New Zealand. In 1958 the SHD was renamed the New Zealand Electricity Department.
By the early 1990s the power board was supplying those areas the city of Tauranga, where it had expanded out of the defined city electricity department's geographical inner city area, the surrounding Tauranga country and the towns of Te Puke and Mt Maunganui. In 1990 it had a staff of 201, 43,158 customers and was making a profit of 2.55 million.
In response to the introduction of the Energy Companies Act in 1992, the Tauranga and Rotorua Electric Power Boards proposed to merge, but it was rejected both by the public and the government.
The power board investigated other options and in 1994 changed its name to Trustpower and its financial structure so that 50% of the ownership was held in a consumer trust, 49% was directly held by customers with the remaining 1% in an employee share ownership scheme.
On 18 April 1994 Trustpower listed on the New Zealand stock exchange. This allowed the specialist infrastructure and utility investor Infratil Ltd to acquire 11 million shares and become its largest shareholder. By this time it had approximately 40,000 customers as well as a half share in the Kaimai hydro power scheme. Meanwhile, the Rotorua Electric Power Board had also changed its financial structure to become the Rotorua Electricity Ltd. By 1995 Trustpower had built up a 67.7% shareholding in this new entity and in 1996 took full control.
In 1995 Trustpower purchased Taupo Electricity Limited and Taupo Generation Limited which gave it a total of 89,000 customers to make it New Zealand's fourth largest power company and third largest power generator.
Merger with Tauranga Electricity
While for many years the directors of Tauranga Electricity had been opposed to merging with other companies to create a Bay of Plenty wide energy company as they were of the opinion the resulting monopoly would push up prices. Eventually however the City Council after receiving many proposals over the years agreed to merge with Trustpower.The merger which occurred on 31 October 1997 guaranteed that the City Council's shareholding in Trustpower would provide an annual revenue of NZ$3.3 million over the next five years.
By 1998 the addition of the Tauranga City's customers meant that new company was supplying 96,513 customers. In 1998 the state-owned Electricity Corporation of New Zealand sold five of its smaller hydro stations, of which Trustpower purchased Coleridge, Highbank/Montalto and Matahina hydro power stations.