One of the greatest motivators for getting solar on your roof is seeing that your neighbour has.

Known as the neighbourhood effect, research shows that seeing others adopt rooftop solar increases nearby installations. Today in New Zealand, rooftop solar can save the average household around $1,000 per year, including financing the upfront cost of the panels.

Adoption also provides other benefits, like low-cost generation into the energy system, community energy resilience, local job creation and, for those with EVs, a much cleaner energy source than fossil fuels.

To unlock this potential, the Queenstown Electrification Accelerator has developed a solar streets map, which shows solar installations in a given region by which street they are on.

This simple tool could show solar installations across the nation, celebrating our collective progress and inspiring more people to make the switch. Now, we want to roll it out nationwide. 

No-one likes seeing energy getting wasted, but by imposing 5kW export limits on customers with solar and batteries, that's effectively what's happening. And we want your help to change it.  

A few EDBs have seen the light and doubled their limits to 10kW recently and, while exports are normally a cherry on top of the solar sundae, this will speed up the payback period for those customers. Some don't have export limits but we are asking for that to be made clear to customers (and celebrated) on their websites.

We were glad to see the Energy Minister Simon Watts make his intentions clear in a letter to all 29 of the EDBs recently. The Electricity Authority quickly followed up the letter by starting the process of regulating EDBs to increase these export limits, unless there is a solid, valid reason not to (have your say on the consultation process here).

We’re all for mandating the EDBs to increase export limits, but we don’t believe customers should have to wait for the regulations to change. These companies should do it now. So we want you to ask them.

The largest battery in NZ will be the cars parked in driveways. 30% of the vehicle fleet, once electrified, is equivalent to more power output capacity than all of NZ’s current power stations. And this power will be distributed throughout distribution networks. This will revolutionise our energy system for the better.

The technology is available and already being installed in New Zealand, and while some EDBs are happy for it to be used (including with no additional distributed generation application where sitting behind an already approved inverter) others are pointing towards vague reasons why they can’t allow it. If you can point to actual regulatory or Code barriers, please let us know so we can ensure work is done to quickly remove these.

While we are launching a pilot in Queenstown later this year to demonstrate at scale what V2G can offer networks and what is needed to maximise the value, benefits are available today and there is no reason to wait. We want EDBs to make it clear to customers on their websites that they are accepting applications for, and therefore willing to approve, V2G.