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Pick the right power. Vote Electric!
As we head into local election season, we're backing electrification and we want you to ensure that your local representatives will make electrification easy and affordable for all of us.
Whether you’re focused on the economics, the emissions or the energy security, everyone wins from going electric. It makes sense for homes, businesses, cities, councils, regions and the country as a whole, and we need our elected officials to understand the massive opportunity that they can help unlock.
Our big ask is that all councils support the proposed Ratepayer Assistance Scheme, which could offer long-term, low-interest loans for electrification upgrades alongside other cost of living and housing benefits. Quite a few have already signed up and we're hopeful many more will follow, so let everyone know this is something you want in your area.
We're also asking them to support local community electrification groups, get off increasingly expensive gas at council facilities, add solar to public buildings, and share information on electrification that can help households save money and reduce emissions.
We've listed all the things that local government can do, created a handy tool that can generate an email to send to candidates, come up with some questions you can ask at meetings, and created a few assets for you to share on social.
Vote for lower bills, lower emissions and higher resilience. Vote electric.
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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