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In Farmer’s Weekly, Phil Weir outlines his vision for farms - and Mike Casey and Rewiring Aotearoa get a special mention.
Mike Casey’s Rewiring Aotearoa comes to mind first. His team have brought electrification to the fore – powering everything from cherry orchards to pump sheds. Banks are following, lining up with green-lending incentives for solar rollout.
But the real lightbulb moment for me wasn’t the panels – it was the battery behind them.
And it doesn’t have to be lithium-ion. Think of hot-water cylinders and chilled-water tanks as thermal batteries. On dairy farms, they store heat for wash-downs or cold for milk chilling – two assets you already need.
Add a modest 30 kW solar array, feed surplus power into those vessels, and you cut peak-grid draw. Slip an electric UTV (or even Elon’s Cybertruck) into the yard, reconfigure water tanks and you’re shifting more load off the grid.
Like the tradie with his van of DeWalt, you do have to stump up upfront. You’ll spend $60-100k on panels, inverters and storage. But payback typically lands well inside a 10-year warranty.
Better still, thermal batteries smooth spikes, trim energy bills and sidestep network outages. Given the fragility of the national grid, that’s a solid example of energy self-sufficiency.
When Mike Casey bought his house near Cromwell, it came with gas bottles on the side of the home for water and an expensive diesel system for the underfloor heating. He replaced both of them with a Steibel Eltron system and it's been saving him money ever since. As technical manager Bhawesh Singh told him at the Electrify Queenstown conference, there has been a big influx in enquiries from homes looking to get off the molecules and onto electrons.
Read moreDownloadConfidence that cutting regulations to make solar power more accessible - won't jeopardise people's safety. A new Regulation Ministry reports laid out a potential blueprint to legalise plug-in solar and reduce the time and cost of panel installation. Rewiring Aotearoa CEO Mike Casey shares his thoughts with Andrew Dickens.
The burgeoning demand for solar was also a chance to address a mismatch between the numbers of training opportunities available and young people searching for work, Casey said. "The mums of New Zealand are telling me that there's not enough apprenticeships for their kids and the solar installers of New Zealand are telling me there's not enough trained people."
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