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Does Indonesia have a returns policy? Despite plenty of talk over the years about the Huntly Power Station being switched off, yesterday the big gentailers reached an agreement to chip in for a big stack of coal so they can ensure the lights stay on if we experience another energy crunch like we did last year. As Mike Casey told Ryan Bridge on Newstalk ZB, bringing in more coal is not ideal, but something had to be done in the short term to deal with our rapidly declining gas reserves. And using more solar and building more renewables and using our stockpile of water in our hydro lakes means we might not need to burn it.
As the energy minister, Simon Watts needs to avoid rolling black outs in winter at all costs because that would be an economic disaster. But as climate change minister he should be doing everything he can to ensure we don't need to burn it.
We are going to need a lot more electricity to power all our electric machines in the future and we need that electricity to be cheap if we hope to unlock the economic benefits in our homes, farms and businesses. But we are not going to get either of those things if we have to rely on an imported, expensive fuel to generate it.
Instead, we need to use the big stockpile of water in our hydro lakes more effectively and we can do that by adding much more rooftop solar (which is the cheapest electricity for households); speeding up the fairly slow pace of large-scale wind and solar projects; rolling out more batteries (large and small) to store energy for use at peak times; and continuing to invest in geothermal.
The largest single power plant in Australia today is a 3.3GW plant that runs on coal. But when you add up all the rooftop solar in Australia, it's around ten times that size.
We're seeing plenty of other markets rapidly shift away from fossil fuels for electricity generation and, as Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone recently, "California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is using 40 percent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did two years ago, simply because it’s built out so many solar farms and battery arrays." This is not a utopian dream. Increasingly, this is economic reality.
Financial commentator Frances Cook uses her own story to show that that an investment in solar and an EV significantly outperforms the stock market and fellow number cruncher Nadine Higgins says that if you do it right, EVs are cheaper to run and own; EV sales have climbed to their highest level since 2022 and are closing in on 2023's numbers and Go Rentals has just invested $2.3 million in some new Tesla Model Y Premiums; the gap between energy costs of diesel vans and utes and electric vans and utes is absolutely massive; solar is also going off right now, with one installer in Otago 448% above their sales target in March; Lightforce has gone back to the Barretts with a new TV ad; Wellington mayor Andrew Little explains its electrification strategy and Hutt City Council shares data showing how its fleet has gone from dirty Toyotas to cleaner EVs; Shenzen in China has electrified its public transport and taxis and that's come with big benefits - and some challenges; and a very simple illustration of the LNG terminal.
Read moreDownloadAs 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.
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