Rewiring Aotearoa

🌞💧 When Mike Casey moved into his house in Central Otago, it had diesel underfloor heating and gas bottles on the side of the house for hot water. He electrified the spatial and hot water heating straight away and invested in heat pumps. Switching to a heat pump system allows you to not only efficiently heat your home but also tackle one of the biggest household energy costs: hot water. Unlike spatial heating, where one unit can warm a shared space, hot water demands increase with the number of people in the household. And, as our data shows, heating water with LPG or gas is far more expensive than electric alternatives. One of the smartest moves? Using surplus solar energy to heat your water during the day, bringing your costs down even further. By making the switch, households can reduce both their energy bills and emissions significantly. 🌍🔋

Imagine switching to an electric vehicle and then receiving a bill from petrol companies for disengaging from the fuel supply network. Or ditching your landline, only to face daily charges until the old phone lines to your house are physically removed. You’d be outraged, right? Yet, this is exactly what many New Zealanders face when they choose to electrify their homes and disconnect from the gas network. Consumers are waking up to the significant cost and climate benefits of fully electrifying their households. In New Zealand, we truly can have our cake and eat it too—reducing emissions and saving money by transitioning to electric solutions. But this shift spells trouble for legacy fossil fuel infrastructure. As more households discover the financial advantages of electrification and leave the gas network behind, the remaining customers are left to bear the growing costs, potentially driving the gas network into a "death spiral." (For more details, check out the RNZ story linked in the comments.) Households can save up to 70% on your energy bills by going fully electric. Learn more about how switching to electric can help you save money and reduce emissions: https://lnkd.in/gxKJK-er

Big solar farms are producing huge amounts of electricity these days. Big residential solar systems are powering homes and sending excess back to the grid. But there are plenty of other uses for smaller solar set-ups, as Mike Casey discovered at the Electrify Wairarapa conference.

There are over 30 million boats in the world. And fewer than 100 of them are electric hydrofoiling boats, but because they are three-to-five times better at using energy than fossil fuel powered boats, they are about to take off, says Vessev CEO Eric Laakman.

Proving that electric technology can reduce costs and emissions for farmers and advocating for rapid electrification as CEO of Rewiring Aotearoa has earned Mike Casey another title, this time the Otago Daily Times business leader of the year for 2024. As business editor Sally Rae wrote: "Being an entrepreneur, it was all about problems to solve and right now there was no bigger problem to solve than the climate problem ... Often climate action was not pro-business but he was a businessman so it was about pairing good smart business with climate action, and his goal was for New Zealand to be seen as a ‘beacon of light’ on how to do that." Forest Lodge Orchard has become a powerful demonstration project to show what's possible and Rewiring Aotearoa's message is hitting home with different types of Kiwis. He's making a positive impact and that makes him feel like he's doing everything he can to make sure his kids' future is a little bit brighter. So, as you reflect on the year that's passed and set a few goals for the years to come, what impact will you have? How are you planning on making the future a little bit brighter? You can start by upgrading one of your old fossil fuel machines and replacing it with a more efficient electric alternative. And then make a plan to upgrade the rest of them. Let's make 2025 more electric.

This was amazing news leading into harvest. Thanks Sally Rae and the Otago Daily Times for highlighting the great work we are doing Rewiring Aotearoa Whakahiko te ao (Let’s electrify everything) https://lnkd.in/gHWH-CfN

Our global emissions problem is largely an energy problem. And, as Saul Griffith says, solving that problem in practice is a machines problem. We can't stop all human activity, so if we want to have our capitalist cake and save the climate too, we need to upgrade all the machines to electric versions and power them with renewable electricity. So if you're making any New year's resolutions, it's time to make the switch in 2025

There's always a fair bit of rubbish to pick up after Christmas and Josh, a project engineer working at Waste Management NZ, is helping to ensure that pick-up is electric. As he explains, while the drivers are initially a bit sceptical, they are quickly converted to the joys of electric driving: smoother, cleaner, quieter, and easier on the body. WMNZ's electric truck fleet recently celebrated a big milestone and clocked up two million kilometres travelled. And while CEO Evan Maehl and the team have had to retrofit their trucks, more of the global manufacturers are producing electric models now and he is pushing New Zealand as a good test market.

'Tis the season for a few festive libations, so imagine if there was a technology that could take one beer and create four. That technology doesn't exist, obviously, but it's basically what a heat pump does when it turns energy into heat. As Saul Griffith explains, because burning things is very inefficient, gas hot water systems lose energy in the process of creating heat. Heat pumps transfer heat from the surrounding air to heat the water and are around three or four times more efficient than gas. That means they need less energy to do the same thing. Cheers to that.

On Aotea / Great Barrier Island, residents are already energy conscious because the homes are off-grid. It is a decentralised network, but Tama Toki's Aotea Energy is looking to find a way to bring community storage into the equation - and he hopes it could eventually help create a solution for different communities around New Zealand that are keen to embrace renewable energy.