It's good for the planet, and good for your wallet.
Rewiring Aotearoa is building electrification knowledge and capability within our whānau, communities and small businesses.
We support community led action in the electrification transition. Ensuring everyone has opportunity to benefit from saving thousands of dollars every year on bills, while lowering emissions and improving resilience.
The future of our communities can be bright as we transition from spending millions on fossil fuels every year to spending that money locally and powering our lives entirely from New Zealand made electricity.
The current policies and regulations surrounding our energy system were built for a fossil fuel world. The only way to practically achieve zero emissions is to understand the fossil fuel machines in the economy.
There is tremendous potential to implement policy that is a win-win-win for the economy, the environment, and our resilience. We work to make sure decarbonisation decisions and policies keep cost of living and consumers at the forefront.
We engage directly with all levels of government, members of parliament, industry and regulatory bodies to advocate and enable action to support community electrification.
The only way to practically achieve zero emissions is to understand the millions of fossil fuel machines that power our households and businesses.
Rewiring Aotearoa works on world-leading research that delves deeper into decarbonisation decision making to facilitate rapid impact across all sectors.
We help businesses and industry understand how they can help facilitate the energy transition at scale, and we work together to develop world-leading projects.
Mike grew up in Wellington before having a successful career as at tech entrepreneur in Sydney. Since selling his startup in 2019, he moved home to New Zealand where he established a fully electric / zero fossil fuel cherry orchard which he believes is a world first. Forest Lodge has become a real-world example for thousands of New Zealanders on how to electrify their farms, businesses and homes.
What they have learnt and the data collected is now used to illustrate how electrification is the clear path forward, good for the wallet and for the planet. Mike's traction in electrification in New Zealand got the attention of the founding team of Rewiring Aotearoa. Forest Lodge is at the point where it is able to be managed by Mike's life long friend Euan White, and Mike is excited to jump into this new opportunity and multiply the momentum he has built through his farm.
“Having successfully electrified 20 machines on my cherry farm, saving thousands on energy bills and saving about 60 tonnes of emissions annually, I believe that pivotal decisions for our emissions reduction will be made around the dinner table. The best part, we can save money on our energy bills in homes, businesses, and on farms, " says Mike Casey, CEO Rewiring Aotearoa.
“We had farmers, we had environmentalists and everyone was standing shoulder to shoulder talking about why electrification is so important, so that was pretty cool. “I think electrification is the only thing that truly aligns people no matter what their beliefs are,” Casey said.
A groundbreaking transformation is underway in the United States, as they embark on an industrial revolution that aims to replace a staggering one billion fossil-fueled machines with clean, electric alternatives fueled by the forces of nature—wind, sun, and water.
Strategic anti-inflationary investment targeted at households to improve the lives of the most vulnerable in society can help us accelerate the transition to a sustainable, low-emissions economy, helping to create a fair chance for all. It can create jobs while directly growing the industries, skills, and broad social understanding we need for the future.
"We you electrify everything you also have to use a diverse set of sources of your electricity, and the majority of that's gonna be solar and wind. In New Zealand you've got a huge amount of hydro that you can use as a battery to store it all. If you had to choose the country in the world that had the easiest pathway to zero emissions - except for it's sheep - you would choose New Zealand."
“That's how much better electrified machinery is than fossil fuels. And given that we've had 50 years trying to change people's behaviour with ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, we can now look back and say. Well, that didn't work very well. “I think we need a new approach. And I think the new approach is, we can do this, we can do it quickly, we can do it without compromising your life in huge ways. In fact, it's probably gonna make it better. And we do that through electrification.” New Zealand has “probably the easiest run at getting to zero emissions of any country in the world because of its hydro,” Griffith says.