Don't listen to Old Man Gas. Ditch LNG. Support New Zealand-made energy!
Labour and the Greens call it a tax. The coalition Government calls it a levy. We call it a forced investment into an old technology that's not needed.Rewiring Aotearoa CEO and Electric Orchardist Mike Casey explained the absurd decision to build a new Liquified Natural Gas terminal on Breakfast and it boils down to this: it is set to be an investment "north of a billion dollars" that locks us into another volatile foreign molecule subscription. All electricity users will be forced pay a fee to fund it (but not gas users). And "if we're lucky", households will see a decrease of $50 a year.
'Downward pressure,' a phrase the Government and the energy industry likes to use to show it's doing something, does not guarantee bills will go down, as we have seen over time. Gas often sets the price of electricity and LNG is a more expensive variety of gas, so, as Marc Daalder writes in Newsroom, it's how it gets used that counts.
Rooftop solar, on the other hand, offers households thousands of dollars of savings each year, including loan repayments. Combine more of that on homes, farms and businesses with lots more grid-scale solar, wind and geothermal to keep water in the hydro lakes, better use of our existing domestic gas reserves for businesses that really need it, and, if we're desperate, coal and diesel (which is hopefully not needed if we build enough), and we have a much better solution to our dry year issue.
Political Power has gone local! Dr Nick Smith, mayor of Nelson and ex-National Party minister, is an early adopter when it comes to electric machines but, through his efforts with the council and his close involvement with the Ratepayer Assistance Scheme, he's also embracing one of Rewiring's core mantras: once you've electrified your own life, electrify someone else's life, too.
Read moreDownloadWhether it's the growing number of electric buses, new electric trains for the lower North Island and City Rail Link, or new electric ferries, we love seeing more electric transport options in our big cities. It's also good to see some of our smaller cities like Palmerston North, Timaru and Nelson going electric and, as is almost always the case, the drivers reckon it's better on electrons. At the Electrify Nelson expo, we spoke with one driver Lee about the city's electric buses. And he definitely wouldn't go back to diesel.
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