The electricity evangelist spreading the solar message

Newsroom

a day ago

Mike Casey is an electricity evangelist, spreading the word from his fossil-fuel-free cherry orchard in Cromwell.
He's the CEO of Rewiring Aotearoa, which has just released two reports – the first is a machine count of all the household items people could (and, the organisation says, should) convert to electricity; the second is a policy manifesto which sets out 59 ways to move towards an electrical utopia.
In a political world where climate change issues don't appear to have a high priority, Rewiring Aotearoa's efforts could have fallen on deaf ears.
However, says Newsroom senior political reporter and climate change writer Marc Daalder, the new Energy Minister Simon Watts has confirmed he's open to adopting the policy marked as the most important – making electrification loans accessible to everyone.
The idea would be to use the high credit ratings of councils to leverage low-interest loans to install home solar panels.
Daalder says such a scheme wouldn't put the debt on council balance sheets, and it would mean the Government wouldn't have to put up much money to do it either.
'Central government would only have to stump up for the set-up costs which would be two to six million dollars, so for someone like Simon Watts who really does want to see a deployment of solar, it's a great cost-of-living policy because it helps people reduce their energy bills, and that's one of the big growing aspects of our household bills at the moment.'
Daalder says not directly having to subsidise solar but still giving the industry a big boost is pretty appealing for the Government. It doesn't need to plough billions into it because it's being consumer-driven and the economic case for the change is transparent as it is – there are just smaller failures around financing.
He says it's fair to say this Government doesn't have a great record on climate policy.
'I think that Rewiring [Aotearoa] has done a good job of finding a niche where actually maybe there can be some progress from the Government.'
And he detects a change of heart in coalition politicians over what some of them have described as 'woke' or 'left-wing' technologies, particularly after it was revealed that solar energy mitigated about $20 million in damages and losses after the toppling of a power pylon that causes outages to 88,000 Northland homes last year.
'I think having Simon Watts as the energy minister makes a big difference as well. There was a sense in the sector that Simeon Brown, the previous energy minster, was somewhat ideologically opposed to some of these clean and green technologies … although, even that sounded like it was starting to shift as the benefits became apparent.'
Mike Casey says the Machine Count project was a case of 'you can't change what you can't measure'.
The report bridges the gap between big, complicated climate policy that's hard to understand, and the sort of discussions people have in their homes – should they buy an electric lawn mower to replace the old one, or when is it best to get an EV, or put solar on the roof.
If Kiwi households upgraded six million of the most easily electrifiable machines, they'd save the country about $8 million a day.
And ditching those fossil-powered gadgets and old cars would slash 7.5 million tonnes off carbon emissions each year.
Some things are too hard to go after.
Getting farmers to swap out their tractors, or unglue people's hands from their barbeques, or get rid of their jet skis just yet is off the immediate agenda.
'When you're talking about electrification, especially with a reasonably traditional Kiwi bloke, then the immediate thing that the conversation moves to is 'I've got no option to electrify my 200 horsepower diesel tractor', or 'electrification of international aviation is still a long way away',' says Casey.
'So it's really important to quantify … you know we've 10 million machines in New Zealand … 8.5 million of them, the technology exists within New Zealand to electrify them right now. A million of them, the technology exists somewhere in the world but for whatever reason they're difficult for us to electrify. And there's about 700,000 machines in New Zealand that the technology just doesn't exist to electrify yet.
'And it's a way of breaking that conversation open to make it less about the 200 hp tractors and more about all the small machines that exist in the home where there's a significant economic and emissions opportunity for our country.'
One of the big changes is likely to be gas cookers, both because the price of gas is going up as the resource gets more scarce, and because the toxins released when cooking with gas inside can be dangerous for children.
But Casey is quick to point out they're not going after the 1,316,620 gas barbecues in the country – not only are electric versions not really up to speed yet, but they're not used often enough for it to be a priority.
'The other thing we've learnt in this whole electrification discussion is that we don't really want to look at banning things or removing things because it actually creates an allergic reaction from a certain section of society which is unproductive for the overall electrification message.'
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