New cars, old cars, as long as they're electric cars 

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As energy expert Tony Seba said, “cost curves are like gravity - and gravity doesn’t care about your opinion.” 

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The cost curves for EVs continue to go down and in China, battery electric vehicles are now cheaper than internal combustion vehicles. Estimates vary for when that will happen elsewhere, but Gartner predicts it will happen in 2027 and Goldman Sachs thinks it will happen in 2025.

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Second hand EVs are also cheaper than comparable gas cars in the US because more of them are coming onto the market. Nearly one in five new cars sold in 2023 was electric, which is more than six times higher than 2018. 

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As the Atlantic story says: “Most of the discourse around EVs is about new cars: Every model launch and the latest high-tech EV feature elicits buzz; Joe Biden’s climate agenda is all about new-EV sales. But the masses might first buy a used one—which means that how plentiful, dependable, and affordable used EVs are could be a key factor in decarbonizing America.

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“EV adoption is really going to skyrocket when people realise that used EVs are out there and they’re reliable." 

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Share and share alike

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Last week’s selection included some interesting research on the role of microgrids in remote Australian regions, and Tama Toki is showing the same thinking is relevant for Aotea / Great Barrier, where he grew up and “where energy security can be precarious”.

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As he told RNZ: “Aotea has no utility for power, so everyone there's super self-sufficient. A lot of people have solar, some kind of car battery set up. Our core business is based there and we had to put a big energy bank in ... and the idea around intermittent generation, if we're not using the assets, the idea was to share with the papakāinga, the community that we worked adjacent with and that's how the seed was planted."

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The team is building its own peer to peer sharing grid and trialling it with 10 homes on the island. It was awarded $50,000 to develop its sustainable energy technology as a part of the Climate Accelerator programme by Creative HQ. And, like Rewiring Aotearoa, he thinks New Zealand should be the world's first renewable economy. 

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Renewables are do-able 

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Climate change is, in large part, an energy problem, with energy accounting for over 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

But a new report from IRENA shows that 85.5% of new installed generation capacity in 2023 was renewables (mainly wind and solar) and fossil generation is on the wane. 

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In an interview with The Business of Tech podcast, Rod Drury shared his desire to turn New Zealand into the Saudi Arabia of renewable electricity.

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Rather than focus on reaching carbon zero, which he says is kind of like going on a diet, he thinks we should focus on creating the world’s cheapest renewable electricity. This benefits everyone and everyone can grasp the concept. We have the resources. We just need the ambition. 

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One of Rewiring Aotearoa’s goals is to create a fully electric economy by 2040. We already have a highly renewable grid, but we are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels for transport and industry. That means only 30% of our total energy use could be considered renewable. So let’s make New Zealand more electric. 

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Learning about less

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^‍Energy Mad has been offering free personalised energy assessments to low-income homes in Auckland since May 2021 and it has just delivered its 11,000^th energy assessment. 

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It offers homes free LED Ecobulbs and efficient shower heads and makes suggestions around improving efficiency, like cleaning filters on heat pumps and using them more efficiently or turning off old energy hogging second fridges. Its database calculates that actions undertaken as a result of these assessments will save these homes $7.35 million per year on their power bills while reducing New Zealand’s peak load by 2.3MW. 

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Efficiency is a big part of the equation, but it pays to remember that electrification is the efficiency we have always been looking for when compared to burning fossil fuels. Electric machines are significantly more efficient than their fossil fuel counterparts and that drives many of the cost savings in a fully electrified home. For example, an electric car is about four times more efficient at converting energy into motion than a petrol car and, even in cold regions, heat pumps are still more than twice as efficient as most other heating options. 

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And it’s even more cost effective when you fuel those machines with rooftop solar, which is the cheapest form of delivered energy New Zealanders can get. 

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Up, up and away! 

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Skiing is a high impact leisure pursuit when it comes to emissions. Diesel groomers, diesel generators potentially powering lifts, big fossil fuel cars driving up the mountain. But for those who want to experience the wonders of gravity through the wonders of electricity, have we got the toy for you: The Zoa PL1 Portable Rope Tow System. 

Just as an e-bike is great for optimising fun and focusing on the downhills, the Zoa is “designed to get skiers and snowboarders more out of their time in the backcountry”. 

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Give us a backcountry hut with 10 of these, please! 

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