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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.
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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