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'You're asking me to use more electricity even though it's getting more expensive?' As you may have gathered, we're pro-electron here at Rewiring, but it's hard to get past this perception and, over the past couple of years, stories about cost increases and supply shortages have been in the news a lot. Not surprisingly, that's affecting the attitudes of New Zealanders and a recent survey from Octopus Energy showed that 85% of respondents were just as worried or more worried about the rising price of electricity this year and 70% thought the Government wasn’t doing enough to help address these costs.
What's not well understood is that upgrading to an electric home and car will require more electricity but much less energy overall when compared to a fossil fuel home and car. Energy is money and rooftop solar, the cheapest form of delivered electricity available to New Zealand homes, reduces those costs even further.
There was more concern about prices after news of Flick's wind-up and its customers heading to Meridian, but more retail competion or structural separation is not guaranteed to reduce the costs for customers because most of the bill increases in the coming years will be to pay for upgrades to our poles and wires.
The sad thing is that it has never been cheaper to generate and store electricity at our own homes. So if the Government is serious about reducing costs for Kiwis, why isn’t it doing anything to help New Zealanders access the savings while also ensuring our existing infrastructure is used more efficiently?
Newsroom's Marc Daalder showed that the Government proposed and then axed home solar incentives and, as Mike Casey said in the piece: “If 80 percent of the rooftops in New Zealand had rooftop solar, based on 2024 figures it would buy us another 29 days’ worth of storage in our hydro lakes – which would have halved the wholesale rate of electricity last year. So there’s a really big reason to look at turbocharging solar adoption in this country, both from a household and cost-of-living perspective as well as an overall energy system perspective.”
While we are working hard to get Wellington to step up, you don't need to wait for Wellington. If you're worried about the rising costs of energy, maybe it's time to put your roof to work and own your energy, rather than just look for a new retailer or search for a few cents off a litre at a different petrol station.
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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