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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.”
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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