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“As long as you’re reducing your reliance on fossil fuels, there’s very little room for regret.” That’s a statement we can get behind and it’s something Rhys Boswell, the operations manager at Christchurch Airport, is continuing to push for.
It might seem strange to be celebrating an airport given the aviation sector is still so reliant on fossil fuels, but the Rewiring philosophy is to electrify what you can and make the right decision when the time comes. There are not many, if any, electric equivalents available when it comes to planes, but there's plenty more that can be done in other areas.
One of the airport's biggest initiatives is the Kōwhai Park solar farm, which is located beside the airport. With around 300,000 panels, Boswell says it will be the biggest in the country and could power 30-40,000 homes. This is just phase one and it has the ability to replicate that two or three times over.
The solar farm will be providing power to the grid (and also helping to irrigate the Canterbury Plains in summer when solar production is high) but it will also provide a chunk of that generation to the airport. Part of the rationale for the deal was that it helped the airport avoid a significant cost that would have been required for an upgrade as it reached the limits of its connection.
While Gary Freedman's Electric Air plane, the Pipistrel Alpha Electro, can often be spotted at the airport, Air New Zealand is currently trialling an electric plane and the innovation continues in this space. Boswell thinks the next generation of domestic turboprop planes will be battery and sustainable aviation fuel hybrids.
There are now a number of electric ground support vehicles at the airport, from tugs to the country’s first electric fire engine. And it also has a number of electric fleet vehicles and chargers.
Everyone is rocking on down to Electric Avenue today (this one online, not that other small one in Hagley Park in Christchurch), so let's ride the lightning: profits and electricity prices keep going up, as panels keep going down; a new paper puts a number on how much more homes with solar sell for; we're bottling things up with big and small batteries and they are eating into gas in Australia and California; transport emissions drop across the Tasman as a result of Government EV incentives, while HEB Construction electrifies its fleet; electrons are coming from above in China; and Xpeng announces the arrival of a crazy looking electric van/aircraft carrier.
Read moreDownloadWarren G and Nate Dogg said it best when they said: 'Regulators, mount up!' - and this week, they have.In a rare joint open letter, three different regulators - EECA (Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority), the Commerce Commission and the Electricity Authority - have basically told the lines companies to pull their socks up and make the most of ‘non-network solutions’ (AKA stop building more expensive poles and wires and start looking at customers and new technology as part of the solution!).
Read moreDownload"The LNG announcement from earlier this month has set the stage: electricity, and the energy sector more broadly, is set to be a major election issue this year. Casey has compared electricity to telecommunications, an area where services have become much cheaper in the last decade with technology advancing. “There are supply challenges for the grid and natural gas, and increasing pressure to find sustainable alternatives as reliance on fossil fuels becomes less viable,” he wrote in a Newsroom piece earlier this month, heralding the “electric election”.
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