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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.
New South Wales gets the memo about the importance of finance and announces scheme offering zero interest loans to households to upgrade to electric stuff; plug-in solar gets the tick of approval to go on sale in the UK soon and the New York Times says it could 'change America'; EVolocity takes electrification to the streets to gets the kids inspired (and eventually employed); a tour of the amazing recycling business Redwood Materials; Think Solar and BYD give it away now; and a skit that cuts close to the bone for many solar dads.
Read moreDownloadAdvances in technology and falling costs mean customer-owned solar and batteries can play a critical role in New Zealand’s energy infrastructure - improving affordability, resilience and sustainability. Multiple trading relationships (MTR) and peer-to-peer trading would enable this potential by increasing competition, customer choice, and innovation in the electricity market, unlocking greater consumer benefits from customer solar and batteries.
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