Nathan> Yes it was a political reference joke; admittedly not all that funny. I LOL'd tho.
In my experience electricity companies love to charge customers who use lots of electricity lots of money.
Really? I was under the impression that the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter, one of if not the biggest electricity user in the country, also got the best deal - way better than the rest of us - due to stability of demand. Admittedly I don't see a data centre requiring that much.
Yeah, the MED sorry MBIE is currently trying to strong arm the other government ministry's into bulk purchasing through one supplier. Which is [i,mo]ronic on a number of levels. Taking a purely positivist free-market approach to infrastructure doesn't work and there is a crap-load of case history to show why. The realities of living in our societies VS doing what is technically and socially right are quite a pain in the arse.