Mike Casey: Rewiring Aotearoa CEO on the Queenstown Electrification Accelerator project

Queenstown could soon be leading the world’s renewable energy future. 

Rewiring Aotearoa is launching the Queenstown Electrification Accelerator project to speed up the transition to electric machines that run on renewable electricity. 

It wants to make it easier for homes and businesses to go electric. 

Chief Executive Mike Casey told Ryan Bridge one of the biggest barriers to going solar is the up-front cost. 

But he says with some of New Zealand's highest energy prices, Queenstown is the best place to turn renewable. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
A group called Rewiring Altiera. They're posing a serious challenge

(00:03):
to the residents of Queenstown. They want to see the
city become the world's most electrified destination. To help with this,
they've launched the Queenstown Electrification Accelerator to help homes and
businesses save money while switching to electric. Mike Cases, the CEO,
with me this morning, get a.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Mike, Good morning, Ryan.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
How are you very well? Thank you, good to have
you on the program. First of all, your group, Rewiring Altier.
Why have you started this group? Where do you get
your funding? What's going on with it?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yeah? So I'm an originally electric cherry farmer from Central Otago.
So I electrified my entire farm twenty one electric machines
and started jumping up and down about the savings opportunities
on farm and eventually expand into creating or helping to
create an NGO that is funded by a lot of
philanthropers in New Zealand now, which is all about helping

(00:53):
the rest of New Zealand to sort of realize the
huge savings potential from converting off Saudi Arabian molecules and
onto New Zealand homegrown electrons.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Why have you picked Queenstown. Why are you picking on Queenstown.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I We're not picking on Queenstown. We think Queenstown is
possibly the best opportunity we have to start doing the
real world action to start trying out all the things
that need to happen to massively or quickly electrify a
particular place. We think the business community is really aligned
under their carbon zero twenty thirty targets that were set

(01:26):
by the council. The councilor is really aligned and we
have a lot of very active community members in the
space that are super excited about the opportunity that's available.
Queenstown has some of the highest energy prices in New Zealand,
so it's a really good place to start. And also
it's got a lot of problems with potential resilience issues
from things like the Southern Alpine fault. So having Queenstown

(01:48):
generate and store a lot of its energy itself and
having machines in Queenstown that can use the energy that
it can generate and store itself is pretty good start.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
It sounds like a great idea. The only problem is
how much it costs to actually do that right. I mean,
otherwise we'd all have solar panels on our roofs totally.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
And so this is one of the key things about
why we're focusing very closely now on a particular community
is we want to make sure that everything from group
buying deals are set up to going and negotiating on
behalf of the community for things like financing deals. One
of the biggest barriers to overcome is that upfront capital
cost of say putting solar panels on your roof and

(02:24):
a battery in your garage and getting gas out of
the home. But we're now at a position, especially in
places like Queenstown, where the capital repayments and the interest
repayments on financing new electric technology may end up actually
being cheaper than your current energy costs. So it means
people can save money from day one.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Do you think that, because I've looked at doing this
myself in Auckland, But do you think people just maybe
aren't aware of that fact yet and once you tell
them they will do something.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Well, I've got a challenge to you. My secret goal
has been to get solar panels on like Hoskin's roof,
but maybe I should change that to riot and we'll
sit down together and I will run you through the details,
and I reckon, within half an hour to forty five minutes,
we can convince you of the economics of it. And yes, Wade,
do you know what?

Speaker 1 (03:09):
It would be easy to get me across the line
and someone hopefully will throw in something free and I'll
do it. I'll do it tomorrow. Hosking is a different
kettle of fish because I don't know, I feel like
putting solar panels on his roof would be some sort
of existential crisis for him.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
You know, I think at the end of the day,
like I'm doing a lot of this with farmers of
New Zealand, and you know, there's a lot of people who,
you know, might approach this with a level of suspicion,
and I think rightly so, because there has been a
lot of virtue signaling in this space for a long time.
But even now I reckon, you know, you give him
a spreadsheet and he looks at it, He'll be like, Okay,
I can see the value in doing this.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
The other problem we've had, I think, with climate change
and with renewable energy in general, is just that there's
there's people who just come across as tosses who espouse it. Now,
there's not you might obviously, but I'm just saying it's
it's had a bad rap I think with Middle New Zealand.
Is that fair to say.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
I think that's one hundred percent fair to say. And
I've caught my fierce ere of flack as a result
of that. You know, you kind of get tired with
the same brush. But when you start to talk about
economics rather than emissions and start talking about, you know,
the benefits to the actual individual from doing this rather
than the you know so much about, say climate and
the emissions associated with that, you start to win people over.

(04:25):
And I've been doing it one farmer at a time
on farm. I'm off the field days today very excited
because there's some major packages that are being announced for
solar and electrification of farms in general. And yeah, now
it's about doing it at the same thing at the
residential level, starting in Queenstown.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Good on your mike, And I think that nothing ventured,
nothing gained, and what's the harm. You know, someone wants
to put a solar panel on their roof, who cares
they're not paying for it? And that I think is
the important message in all of this Mike, thank you
very much for coming on the program. For more from
Early Edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live to news talks
it'd be from five am weekdays, or follow the podcast

(05:03):
on iHeartRadio.