Energy Minister Simeon Brown made no formal announcement in a Budget that the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, had said would focus on energy security as one of the three key areas of focus for the Government.

The detailed Budget documents show that the last four of 10 years’ of committed funding, totalling a little over $24 million, have been discontinued.

The move appears to have come as a surprise to the rank and file at the Taranaki-based centre, which earlier this week launched the fifth update on its geo-heat strategy along with the new government science agency, Earth Sciences NZ.

A spokesperson for Ara Ake told Carbon News they would be unable to comment on the decisions until next Tuesday, implying that staff are only now being informed of the decision.

Some of the centre’s activities will transfer to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, where some $3 million a year of Ara Ake’s previously committed funding is being directed until 2030.

The agency was established in Taranaki by the Labour-led government under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in part as a political response to the potential impact of its 2018 offshore oil and gas exploration on a region that has been at the heart of New Zealand’s petrochemical industry for decades.

“It's a huge loss,” says Labour’s energy spokeswoman and energy minister at the time of Ara Ake’s establishment, Megan Woods. “We need an organisation dedicated to making sure we have innovation for clean energy.

“We need ways to access new technologies that will lower costs and emissions.”

She noted that the Budget had benefited from the return of unused funds that had been earmarked for the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry (GIDI) fund, which the current government closed down soon after its election in 2023.

That saw some $20 million of saved funds reprioritised for the installation of solar power arrays on schools over the next two fiscal years, which Woods welcomed.

Ara Ake had always been expected to start finding its own funding sources after the first 10 years with government funding.

The agency’s most recent annual report, for the year to June 30 2025, shows the agency received $10.2 million in government grants that year, close to double the $5.9 million it received the year before.

In that year, it earned just $65,733 in “other income” from providing workshops and events and $631,748 from interest on term deposits in the same year.

The Budget made little mention elsewhere of climate change other than in the context of resilience investments.

Some $400 million was announced for a variety of roading projects, including the Waioeka and Awakino gorges, the Takaka hill road and parts of the Coromandel Peninsula that have been repeatedly closed during extreme weather events.

The Treasury continued to publish no estimate of the Crown’s potential liability for the cost of meeting the country’s Paris agreement targets.

The secretary to the Treasury, Iain Rennie, told a select committee last year that it would take a first cut at that calculation for the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update (Prefu), which is due in late September or early October ahead of the November 7 general election.