Read our new Electric Homes and Vehicles report
'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.
When Mike Casey bought his house near Cromwell, it came with gas bottles on the side of the home for water and an expensive diesel system for the underfloor heating. He replaced both of them with a Steibel Eltron system and it's been saving him money ever since. As technical manager Bhawesh Singh told him at the Electrify Queenstown conference, there has been a big influx in enquiries from homes looking to get off the molecules and onto electrons.
Read moreDownloadConfidence that cutting regulations to make solar power more accessible - won't jeopardise people's safety. A new Regulation Ministry reports laid out a potential blueprint to legalise plug-in solar and reduce the time and cost of panel installation. Rewiring Aotearoa CEO Mike Casey shares his thoughts with Andrew Dickens.
The burgeoning demand for solar was also a chance to address a mismatch between the numbers of training opportunities available and young people searching for work, Casey said. "The mums of New Zealand are telling me that there's not enough apprenticeships for their kids and the solar installers of New Zealand are telling me there's not enough trained people."
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