The 'Electric Election': energy policies, side by side
Solar and storage on farms has been going off like a frog in a sock recently. And Federated Farmers has made it a big part of its election manifesto. While Wayne Langford recently missed out on a fourth term as president, he's a Bright Spark in our books for all the work he's done to get this issue on the political radar and help speed up adoption.
Rewiring was invited to take up a spot in its Advocacy Hub at Fieldays and Mike Casey spoke to Langford about the organisation's three main asks for the next Government in this area: unleash the potential of solar, establish national standards for small -and medium-scale solar installs, and level the electricity playing field.
As it says in the manifesto, solar presents a unique opportunity for farmers and rural communities to cut costs, increase resilience, improve environmental outcomes, and even diversify income streams. But it is not just an opportunity for rural communities.
"It’s a huge opportunity for New Zealand Inc. On-farm solar could effectively become the country’s largest and most sustainable power plant."
While solar technology has moved quickly, the regulatory system hasn’t kept pace – and that’s become a huge point of frustration.
"Farmers investing in solar often face expensive, unnecessary and unjustified resource consenting costs", and establishing a national standard would go a long way to fixing that.
Another concern for many farmers who have installed solar is the difficulty they face selling electricity back into the grid at a fair price.
"To put it bluntly, they’re getting a raw deal. Power companies pay farmers only a fraction of the price they later sell that electricity for, while pocketing the difference."
Allowing multiple trading relationships and peer-to-peer trading would also improve the returns from on-farm solar investment.
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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