Why is everyone jumping on the rooftop-solar wagon?
For a minute there you couldn’t move for political parties pledging the path to a solar future. The Greens, Labour and National have all set out policies to make domestic installation of panels affordable, whether through cheap loans, subsidies, or a mix of both. For Act, the focus is dismantling regulatory hurdles.
Across all the initiatives, you can see the fingerprints of Rewiring Aotearoa and its CEO, Mike Casey. For the last three years, the nonprofit charity has been advancing the case for a more electric New Zealand, with an emphasis on rooftop solar, making its arguments using methods ranging from data-heavy documentation to giving politicians a hoon on an electric tractor at Casey’s 100% electric cherry orchard in Central Otago.
Why have politicians embraced the issue, and why now? “The underlying thing is the principles of our movement are incredibly sound,” said Casey, speaking to The Spinoff for a new episode of At Large with Toby Manhire.
“New Zealanders, on an individual basis, will be far better off by electrifying all the things in their lives, and their towns will be far better off, and the country will be far better off, and the planet will be far better off.”
To that confluence, add another factor – “overseas tyrants creating wars”, said Casey. “And as a result, the type of energy that we don’t want has gone up in price significantly, and it’s just led to an outcome now where I think there is some seriously good interest in investing in New Zealand’s future.”
Casey said he was thrilled to see politicians – some drawing also on the the Ratepayer Assistance Scheme set out by Local Government NZ – getting to grips with the central challenge. “Ultimately the biggest barrier to people doing this is the upfront capital cost,” he said. Beyond that it was for most people an “economic slam dunk”, he said. “So we’ve really… been relentless with our narrative, which is that it’s the finance – it’s a lack of finance to relieve that upfront capital cost.” He and his colleagues had sought to “speak very evenly and openly and share all the data with all political parties, and then allow them to fit that into their own political narrative.”
Solar is not a cure-all, however – certainly not immediately. Record demand for electricity in Aotearoa tends to hit in the middle of winter, after dark – the very worst conditions for plugging into the sun. That’s when, as Casey acknowledged, New Zealand found it “needed to fire up all the coal furnaces to keep the lights on”. It was critical to keep on those lights, and those heaters, said Casey, but the solution needed at minimum to focus on “New-Zealand-made energy”, given “this is Indonesian coal that we are burning”.
As far as solar is concerned, “the short answer is every battery that goes into a home removes that home from that congestion period, and if we get the pricing signals right, where we reward customers fairly for their behaviour going back in the other direction [into the network], we dial down the amount of generation that is required during those times,” he said.
“Both of those things don’t really exist in the way they should exist at the moment, and that all comes down to regulatory change… Technically, you could get away with just putting a battery in a home, charging the battery before that peak period, running the home off that battery, maybe even exporting that battery back to the grid during that peak period, if people were rewarded fairly for it.”
What about the LNG terminal that the government intends to commission? Is that a reasonable patch on the network? “My worst fear is that we spend one and a half billion dollars building a piece of infrastructure that we never use,” said Casey. “Actually, that’s not my worst fear. That’s my realistic fear. My worst fear is that we keep our industry hooked on gas [so] the taxpayer has to subsidise the volume cost of that gas, which is going to come and land it at a much higher price than New Zealand domestic gas supply… I don’t think replacing gas with more gas is a good way to go.”
Casey’s path to solar preacher is dotted with cherries – specifically, the orchard he purchased in Central Otago after returning from Australia having sold his startup, a graduate job platform. They planted almost 10,000 cherry trees. “I decided that I would look at buying electric machines because I thought electric technology was cool, and I did put a climate lens to this,” he said.
“But the price of electricity, the price of fossil fuels, all continued to go up. And by the time I was done electrifying those 21 [farm] machines, I was, like, wow, there would be a $50,000 diesel bill here, and the savings easily pays for the finance to [electrify]. That made me realise that there’s actually a bigger opportunity for the whole country, for the whole motu, and I’ve been at that for three years now, really banging that drum.”
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