The 'Electric Election': energy policies, side by side
It's normally very difficult to fuel up when you're flying, but the aircraft developed by Christchurch company Kea Aerospace makes it look easy because it relies on the big nuclear fusion reactor in the sky.
Kea Aerospace opened its new facility in Christchurch last week. The 3,000sqm space is designed to house a new unmanned aircraft called the Atmos Mk 2, which has a 35m wingspan. That is bigger than an Airbus A320. It will also be mission control for any launches.
Kea Aerospace's first plane, the Mk I, had a 12.5m wingspan and weighed just 40kg. That project kicked off in 2021 and CEO Mark Rocket says it was designed to fly from dawn till dusk in the stratosphere.
The Mk II is all about flying continuously, for weeks or months at a time, he says, and that's down to a combination of solar, very light materials, energy efficiency and new battery technology.
CTO Philipp Sueltrop says it uses about as much energy as a hairdryer when it's flying and, unlike some other space-focused companies, even the launches are electric, with an Audi e-Tron helping the planes to take off.
Kea Aerospace is in the aerial photography and surveillance game and New Zealand has a lot of space to monitor. Sueltrop says Australia and New Zealand are responsible for 21% of the world's water surface. There's illegal fishing, smuggling and real defence issues to deal with.
Satellites can't do it all to the fullest, and neither can manned planes, he says. That's the gap it's aiming to fill and, as solar efficiency and battery technology improves, there's an opportunity to fly further.
While aviation is one of the sectors where electric options don't yet exist or are uneconomic (unlike 84% of New Zealand's ten million fossil machines), Rocket says there is a lot of potential with short-haul electric flights and US company BETA recently tested one of its electric planes for Air New Zealand.
"There are use cases where this works, and there will be more use cases where you can integrate fully electric, maybe solar-powered aviation," says Sueltrop.
BloombergNEF says sales of combustion cars peaked in 2017 and there's no coming back, while a new study in New Zealand shows petrol vehicles were losing value more quickly than equivalent models did a decade ago; big batteries aren't just for storing electricity, they can also store heat; the story of the world's biggest electric ferry and the Australian company that made it; electric motorbikes are doing a lot of heavy lifting on emissions reduction, so why don't they get more attention?; and a new show called HallowGreen2 that tackles the energy transition "with music, humour and a hopeful message”.
Read moreDownloadRNZ's Kate Newton looks at why no-one is really talking about emissions as an election issue. As Mike Casey said: "The climate movement up until this point has been very, very good at creating dartboards, but terrible at providing people with darts to play the game." That's allowed for inaction, and active lobbying against climate change action from fossil fuel companies and others who stand to lose out ... The solution is "flipping it into a strong economic narrative that they can't possibly fight with".
Read moreDownloadHumans are comparative creatures and they're particularly comparative during election season. That's why we've created a rundown of all the energy-related election policies that have been announced by the parties so far.
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