1 · Who this policy is from
This policy is published by Tīrama Energy Limited (referred to as "tīrama", "we", "us" or "our") under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020. It applies to every interaction you have with tīrama, visiting tiramaenergy.co.nz, joining our waitlist, applying for service, becoming a customer, contacting us by phone or email, and having a tīrama battery installed at your property.
Tīrama Energy Limited is an agency for the purposes of the Privacy Act and is the controller of the personal information described here.
2 · The short version
The detail is below, but here's the core of it:
- We collect what we need to supply you with electricity and to install, operate and maintain your battery. Nothing speculative.
- We don't sell your personal information. Ever.
- We share with industry participants where we're required to (your lines company, the registry, the wholesale market operator) and with our service providers (battery platform, billing, payment processor) under contracts that bind them to the same standards.
- You can ask to see what we hold about you, correct it, or take it elsewhere, at no cost.
- We hold information securely in New Zealand and Australian-hosted data centres operated to ISO 27001 standards. A limited set of information is handled offshore by our service providers, and we only use providers bound to comparable safeguards. See section 5.
3 · Information we collect
| Category | What this includes |
|---|---|
| Identity | Your full name, date of birth, contact email, mobile, and a form of identity verification (driver's licence number, passport number, or RealMe credential). |
| Property & supply | Your supply address, your Installation Control Point (ICP) number, your current retailer, your lines company, and the configuration of your meter and switchboard. |
| Account & billing | Your bank account details for direct debit, your billing address (if different from supply), your bill cycle preference, and any payment arrangements. |
| Consumption | Half-hourly reads from your meter, readings from the battery every minute (your home's power use, what the battery stores and sells, and its charge and health), and your solar generation if you have panels. |
| Credit | With your consent when you apply, a credit check through a credit reporting agency, and its result. |
| Vulnerability & medical | Where you've told us, whether anyone in your household is a medically dependent consumer or a vulnerable consumer, including the supporting documentation provided by your health practitioner. |
| Communications | Records of your conversations with our team: call recordings (with notice), email threads, SMS, and notes from any home visits. |
| Website | Aggregate visit data: pages viewed, referral source, browser type and country, collected through cookieless analytics. If you fill in a waitlist or enquiry form, the name, email, phone and address you enter, the number of people living at the address, and your answer on whether the next power bill is a worry. See section 9. |
We collect this information directly from you whenever we can. Where it comes from a third party, for example, your previous retailer or the central Registry as part of the switching process, we'll tell you what we received and why.
4 · Why we collect it
Each piece of information has a specific purpose. We use your information to:
- Verify who you are and assess your application for service.
- Switch your ICP across to tīrama in accordance with the Electricity Industry Participation Code.
- Install, commission, monitor, maintain and remove your battery.
- Bill you accurately and process your payments.
- Operate your battery as part of our aggregated portfolio in wholesale and grid-services markets.
- Respond to your queries, complaints and faults.
- Honour the protections that apply to you if you are a medically dependent or vulnerable consumer.
- Comply with our regulatory obligations under the Electricity Industry Participation Code 2010, the Consumer Care Obligations, and applicable financial-services and tax legislation.
- Improve our service: analyse anonymised consumption patterns and battery performance to refine our offer.
6 · How we hold & protect it
Personal information is held electronically in cloud infrastructure operated by Amazon Web Services in their Sydney region, with offsite backups in a New Zealand-hosted facility. Both providers operate to ISO 27001 information-security standards and have published independent attestations.
Access to your information is restricted to tīrama staff and contracted service providers who need it to do their job. All access is logged. We use multi-factor authentication for staff access to customer systems, and we encrypt personal information in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256).
If we ever experience a privacy breach that is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify you and the Privacy Commissioner without undue delay, in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020 notifiable-breach requirements.
7 · How long we keep it
We hold your information only as long as we need it.
- Account records are retained for the duration of your service agreement plus seven years, to meet tax and regulatory record-keeping obligations.
- Meter reads and battery readings are retained for seven years for reconciliation and dispute purposes; anonymised aggregates may be retained indefinitely for service improvement.
- Recorded calls are retained for 18 months, then deleted.
- Waitlist signups are deleted within 12 months of the relevant region launching, or earlier on request.
- Medical dependency documentation is retained for the duration of the registration plus two years.
8 · Your rights
Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to:
8.1 Access your information
You can ask for a copy of any personal information we hold about you. We respond within 20 working days. There is no charge for a request.
8.2 Correct your information
If anything we hold is wrong, ask us to correct it. If we agree, we update our records and inform anyone we've shared the incorrect information with. If we disagree, we'll attach your statement of correction to the record.
8.3 Withdraw consent
Where we rely on your consent (for example, to share information with a budgeting agency), you can withdraw it at any time by contacting our Privacy Officer. Withdrawal doesn't affect anything done before you withdrew consent.
8.4 Complain
If you believe we've mishandled your information, raise it first with our Privacy Officer (below). If you're not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner: privacy.org.nz, 0800 803 909.
9 · Cookies & the website
tiramaenergy.co.nz uses very few cookies, and none of them are advertising cookies. Our analytics are cookieless.
- Strictly necessary, session cookies that let the site work (form state, security tokens). These can't be disabled.
- Analytics, we use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-respecting, cookieless analytics service hosted in the European Union. It sets no cookies at all and does not track you across sites. It reports aggregate page views, referral sources and country-level location only. Your IP address is used momentarily to derive that country and is never stored. Because no cookie is set and no individual is identified, there is nothing here to consent to or opt out of, though any browser-level tracker blocking will stop it and the site will work exactly as before.
- Fonts, the site's typefaces load from Google Fonts. Your browser requests them from Google, which receives your IP address with the request. No cookie is set.
We do not use third-party advertising tags, retargeting pixels, social-media tracking pixels, or session-replay tools on this site.
10 · Changes to this policy
We update this policy when our practices change, when the law changes, or when we add new services. We post the updated version here with a new version number and review date. For material changes, we email registered customers at least 20 working days before the change takes effect.
The version history of this policy is available on request.
11 · Contact our Privacy Officer
For anything privacy-related: to access your information, to ask a question, to raise a concern, or to request a correction, contact our Privacy Officer directly.
Email: privacy@tiramaenergy.co.nz
Post: Privacy Officer, Tīrama Energy Limited, Shed 22, Level 1, Prince's Wharf, 147 Quay Street, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
We respond to all privacy requests within 20 working days, in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020.
If you're not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner: privacy.org.nz, 0800 803 909, enquiries@privacy.org.nz.