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Rewiring Aotearoa's policy director Dave Karl talks to Damien Venuto about the expensive energy subscriptions most of us have to pay now and the role of solar, batteries and finance in reducing those massive costs. "Factoring in the cost of the system, Karl estimates that a family would be as much as $37,000 better off at the end of that 30-year period. And the savings would keep coming in the years that followed."
Electricity costs were up a staggering 12.2% in the December quarter, according to the latest figures from Statistics New Zealand.
The striking thing about this is that an energy bill is something we simply have to pay. It isn’t our morning coffee treat, a discretionary item we can easily opt out of buying for a few weeks.
Tinkering around the edges by reducing usage will help to moderate the bill, but it won’t make you immune to the impact of inflation. According to Karl, a better approach is to reduce your dependency on traditional energy providers.
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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