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The big solar installs continue in New Zealand at Go Media Stadium and Ngā Hua e Whā, the largest marae in the Southern Hemisphere; rooftop solar closes in on our biggest power plants; the world's biggest battery is switched on in Australia and lots of small batteries play an important role in California; Bloomberg looks at the incorrect predictions on EV adoption and how they're wrong in both directions; it's not just the wealthy countries adopting EVs as Nepal hits 76%; GM gets the record for longest drive on a single charge; and dads like electric stuff.
Light it up
The big solar installs keep coming in New Zealand and Go Media Stadium in Auckland has switched on 1,651 solar panels - becoming what it says is the first stadium in New Zealand to do so.
The new system will generate around 800 MWh a year, which is equal to 60% of the stadium’s total energy usage, lower its carbon footprint, and generate $150k of savings each year. The investment is expected to pay for itself within six to eight years. If only they could harness the energy of a Warriors crowd and stick that in a battery.
Down south in Christchurch, there’s now over 350 panels powering Ngā Hua e Whā, the largest marae in the Southern Hemisphere. This produces 64% of the marae’s energy needs and will save around $1,600 per month. The battery means it can also act as a community hub in emergencies.
We’re coming from a very low base in New Zealand, but it's picking up and the combined generation from rooftop solar in New Zealand is now bigger than all but two of our power plants, Huntly and Manapouri.
A battery of tests
As Sir Mix-a-lot famously sang, we like big batts and we cannot lie. And the world’s biggest was just switched on across the ditch.
“The A$1 billion grid-scale battery will supply power to nearly one million homes for an hour.” And it will play a crucial role in balancing the grid, largely because of all the solar in the system.
It’s not all about the big batts, however. As Electrek wrote, the small battery fleet gave a big assist to the network in California recently:
More than 100,000 home batteries across California stepped up as a virtual power plant last week in a scheduled test event, and the results were impressive, according to new analysis from The Brattle Group.
Sunrun’s distributed battery fleet delivered more than two-thirds of the energy during a scheduled two-hour grid support test on July 29. In total, the event pumped an average of 535 megawatts (MW) onto the grid – enough to power over half of San Francisco.
EV does it
This week we published an explainer on why the climate needs electric vehicles. There are plenty of opinions on the matter. And plenty of predictions, too.
As Bloomberg wrote, OPEC (not surprisingly) underestimated the rapid uptake of EVs and its estimate for pure electric car sales was “hit at the beginning of 2020, a remarkable 20 years earlier than OPEC anticipated”.
Others (including some big investors like Cathie Wood’s Ark) have also been wrong with their predictions, but in the other direction, as the chart below shows.
The IEA has consistently underestimated solar uptake and it pays to remember that solar first became practical in the 1950s, trundled along for decades and is only now having its moment in the mainstream because the price has come down so much.
Many seem to have underestimated how good China is at making cars, so it will be interesting to see if adoption rates start to pick up speed and get closer to those optimistic predictions. As EVs close the gap on upfront costs with fossil fuel cars and as V2X becomes a reality, we predict the only way is up.
China’s neighbours certainly seem to be benefitting and, while the argument is often that it’s just rich countries that can afford EVs, that isn’t always the case. As the New York Times reported, 76% of all car imports in Nepal last year were electric or hybrid vehicles, up from basically nothing five years ago.
A lot of the EVs being sold in Asia are replacing smaller, dirtier vehicles that have a major effect on air quality. This is often an underappreciated part of the EV transition and, as the Atlantic wrote, America is missing out on the biggest EV boom of all, the electric rickshaw.
In the long run
EVs continue to drop in price, and they are also getting better. GM broke a record recently after a modified Chevy Silverado drove over 1,600km on a single charge.
It wasn’t being driven in real-world conditions (i.e, very slowly and with no aircon), but it’s still pretty impressive and new battery technologies promise to bring significant improvements.
Electrify your dad
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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