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It's pretty rare for someone to be invited back to the E Tipu Agri Summit two years in a row, but Mike Casey has plenty to talk about. Rewiring Aotearoa's Electric Farms paper proved there are similar benefits for the rural sector if we can turn farms into power plants and, as he says - and as he has shown on his own cherry orchard - New Zealand’s farmers could reduce their operational costs by going electric and generating a lot of their own electricity through mid-scale solar and battery systems. And they can also make money by feeding electricity back into the grid at times of high demand. “Whether in the home or on the farm, electrification is a real win-win. It’s not just the right environmental decision anymore, it’s the right economic decision. It’s a no-brainer. We just have to figure out how to make it easy.”
After ‘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.
Read moreDownload"We’ve got fuel prices climbing towards four dollars a litre. We’ve got global instability, supply lines under pressure, and once again New Zealand is sitting here — exposed. But what’s different this time…it’s the reaction."