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Rewiring Aotearoa CEO Mike Casey is intereviewed by Checkpoint's Lisa Owen about the SolarZero saga and says solar remains the future, but owning your panels rather than renting them is the way to deliver the biggest savings.
Casey told Checkpoint the technology itself is "100 percent the future" and was the cheapest energy available to New Zealand households.
Business models "come and go" and it was about getting the most affordable energy in human history to Kiwi households.
Casey said SolarZero "put solar on the map" and accelerated installations in New Zealand, but a changing market and a decrease in prices meant its business model did not have a long-term future.
These days, Casey said it was cheaper for households to own the panels and batteries, financing them on their mortgages rather than leasing them.
But New Zealand was still far behind Australia in the update of solar panels.
Where 35 percent of households in Australia had rooftop solar panels, just 3 percent of Kiwi homes had them.
The average install in New Zealand was about five kilowatts, costing $10,000.
In Australia, the average was 10kW, and about $20,000.
Casey said New Zealand needed to fix the rules and regulations to inherit the "well oiled machine" that was the Australian solar industry.
It was "unfortunate" the customer had lost the option of SolarZero but the right business model "will prevail in this country".
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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