Sources please! There&#x27;s more to retail than just billing. Off the top of my head there&#x27;s advertising, acquisition of customers, creation of plans&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;campaigns, getting consumption information (which in New Zealand is from 50+ local distribution companies, each with their own formats), there&#x27;s purchasing from the wholesale market in such a way that you&#x27;re not losing money all the time, there&#x27;s setting up a call centre to service those customers, there&#x27;s meeting regulatory requirements such as a government disputes process, those are just the ones I can think of sitting here.<p>And I&#x27;m not saying that those costs should be massive, I&#x27;m just saying those costs exist. Someone must pay for them. Considering I&#x27;ve observed that the margin on retail electricity customers is not much (like $2K of customer lifetime value over 10 years), it&#x27;s not like in New Zealand electricity companies are rolling around in cash from profit per customer, it&#x27;s really just a volume game (the company I worked for had 430,000 retail customers).<p>BTW, the value chain in energy from generation to transmission to meter to cash is full of lots of participants. In New Zealand, the generator, wholesaler, retailer, national distributor, and local distributor are all separate entities. To say &quot;Utilities ... are overestimating their stranded costs to the extent that they don&#x27;t count the increase in the efficiency of their ability to serve load&quot; ignores the reality of this value chain. At best, this really only benefits the local distributor.