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As Mike Casey told Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB, while we might not be able to do much about the oil required to make the plastic pipes (and the coming price increases), we can do something to insulate ourselves against petrol and diesel price spikes.
"Have you bought Kate her EV yet?"
Around two thirds of the total energy New Zealand uses comes from fossil fuels, most of which are imported. And we've seen how risky that reliance is recently as prices went through the roof.
When you add households and their cars together as a sector, it is the biggest energy user in the country. That's why we're so focused on helping them upgrade to electric, because greater prosperity begins at home.
Our Machine Count report released last year showed there were ten million fossil fuel machines in the country. A very small number don't have electric options (yet). Some require a bit of effort to electrify. And around 8.5 million of them could be electrified economically today using current technology.
Many of those machines are vehicles and ensuring more of them run on cheaper New Zealand-made energy needs to be seen as an issue of national and economic security.
See how going electric can improve our energy security here.
New Zealand has passed the "tipping point" where most people buying solar panels will save more money than they spend on them, researchers say, but more could be done to unlock households' ability to make use of solar power. Josh Ellison, research lead for Rewiring Aotearoa, said the country was one of the first where the electrification of homes and vehicles could deliver cost-of-living savings and reductions in emissions at the same time. He said the tipping point was probably passed about three years ago but has now been crossed for battery storage systems, too.
There can't be too many off-grid MPs in the world, but Celia Wade-Brown is one of them and she's the latest candidate in our ongoing series Political Power, where we get up close and personal with our elected representatives about their energy use.
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