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What Mike Casey argued for so coherently and passionately this morning on Q+A with Jack Tame isn't pie in the sky stuff. The electrification opportunity is there to be grasped.
Electrification stacks up economically for homes, most businesses and the country as a whole and, as we keep saying, solar, EVs, batteries, heat pumps and renewables are not woke, they just work. We just need to get past the culture war crap and help more New Zealanders deal with the cost of living crisis.
More electric machines running on New Zealand-made energy will also reduce our reliance on imported fuel and make our existing stocks go further for the machines that need it.
And, massive added bonus in case anyone has forgotten what's happening with the weather, there's no contest when it comes to emissions.
Right now, we're dealing with a crisis and we hope it doesn't come down to rationing. But we also need to learn from this and plan for the next one. We need to keep thinking big and building more cheap solar, wind and geothermal. But we also need to think small and electrify as many of our ten million fossil fuel machines as possible.
That's the bit that often gets overlooked but, as Casey said, a lot of a little is a lot. So, to all those politicians thinking about how to get the votes in the 'electric election', let's make New Zealand-made energy our North Star, let's run more electric machines on that energy and let's and do everything we can to create the world's most electric economy.
As 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.
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."