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Andrea Vance digs into the big infrastructure deficit faced by Queenstown as it deals with rapid growth - and Rewiring Aotearoa's Josh Ellison explains how the ambitious Queenstown Electrification Accelerator will help address the region's energy concerns and turn it into the world's most electric destination.
As she wrote:
The Queenstown Electrification Accelerator, an ambitious plan for the town to become the world’s most electrified destination launched last month. The pilot will build a low-cost, low-emissions, resilient energy system, combining local rooftop generation with traditional grid power.
“If we could have an infrastructure environment where households and farms and businesses were treated as an equal part of the energy system, we’d be able to deploy a lot more solar and batteries a lot faster,” says Josh Ellison of Rewiring Aotearoa.
“Historically, electricity infrastructure has been large-scale... But now, a combination of large-scale and small-scale operating together in the system is what’s going to work.”
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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