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Annie Jefferson from A2W is always in hot water.
Through A2W, she's a staunch advocate for hot water heat pumps, which are quickly growing in popularity here like they have in Australia, and a big supporter of the community electrification movement.
She can often be found at electrification events - from Electrify Wairarapa to Electrify the Hutt - explaining the latest tech for water and space heating and running people through the process of upgrading old cylinders or retrofitting gas systems.
Heat pump technology can significantly reduce energy bills (and the country's emissions) and she has grasped that installing them is also a big business opportunity. We're going to need a lot of trusted tradies to nail our electric transition and, as demand ramps up, the herding mentality takes hold and the community movement continues to push things in an electric direction, the business owners who embrace it early, like Jefferson, and the entrepreneurs who develop companies to solve customer problems, stand to benefit the most.
As Minister of energy, climate and local government, Simon Watts had a great opportunity to push the country towards cheaper, cleaner and more reliable New Zealand-made energy. And that’s why we laid down a challenge and gave him the ‘MegaWatts’ moniker last year. Rewiring Aotearoa CEO Mike Casey says he did some good things, like enabling more solar on farms, removing tax on solar exports, fixing onerous solar consenting requirements, putting pressure on the lines companies to pull up their socks, and getting the ball rolling on the Ratepayer Assistance Scheme. "But the LNG import terminal appears to have been a defining issue."
Read moreDownloadAfter ‘crunching the numbers’ and adding in new sources of ‘New Zealand-made energy’ to our equations, CEO Mike Casey has announced that Rewiring Aotearoa will be changing its name to Refuelling Aotearoa. There has been a huge amount of independently verified research showing electrification beats fossil fuels on economics, efficiency, emissions and energy security and that there is a huge opportunity for New Zealand to electrify, but the discovery of an infinite supply of snake oil in New Zealand has changed everything, he says.
Read moreDownload"We’ve got fuel prices climbing towards four dollars a litre. We’ve got global instability, supply lines under pressure, and once again New Zealand is sitting here — exposed. But what’s different this time…it’s the reaction."