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- Date published:
8:51 am, March 31st, 2026 - 27 comments
Categories: 2026 oil crisis, energy -
Tags: electrification, how change happens, jack tame, Mike Casey, ReWiring Aotearoa
It’s not often that I watch a news interview and sit there going: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This 12 minute interview by Jack Tame, with ReWiring Aotearoa CEO Mike Casey, is superb (video below). It’s exactly the kind of thinking we need, to present a smart, accessible and heartening narrative of what our society could be like if we chose sustainability and resilience. Casey is focussed on the electrification of New Zealand, and he rolls out both hard data and the kind of conceptual stories that paint a completely different picture than we are used to.
The most potent thing here is that we have a huge opportunity with the oil crisis to turn towards sustainability and resilience and this interview presents one major pathway. Imagine if we were already largely electrified going into the oil crisis. This interview lays out what we can do next.
Some of the narrative shifts:
New Zealand is very very good at making electricity (!), the North Star now is New Zealand-made energy.
We need to bring everyone along, the people who can least afford it are the ones who would benefit most. Bringing down people’s costs is a major focus. And he’s got plans for how the prices can come down.
Casey is also honest. EVs aren’t going to get us out of the current crisis. But they will help us build back better.
He’s not overtly partisan but doesn’t hold back on criticism of National for its disruption of solar and EV roll out. But then makes the point,
When you have a lack of strategy, it’s a crisis that changes the system
I remain doubtful that New Zealand can fully electrify and carry on BAU. We are so far into overshoot, the climate and ecology crisis demands we shift out of a perpetual growth economy. In energy terms, this means living within our biophysical means rather than treating the planet as a bucket of endless resources. That’s a big mental shift.
What I like about this interview is that Casey presents the figures and pulls the transition back into what works for New Zealand society rather than what makes the economy grow and is meant to trickle down. He’s describing how people are better off financially with an EV, and he’s talking solar panels on household roofs, not mega solar and wind farms. This is the kind of Just Transition story that turns us in the right direction.
He's heroic, but the structural impasse is illustrated by the fact that his orchard is dominated by Contact's Roxburgh Dam which is downriver from Contact's Clutha Dam which is in turn fed by Contact's Hawea dam.
All power to him but for the most part our energy price and availability decisions are made by boardrooms in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Singapore, London and elsewhere.
It is the power companies who are holding New Zealand back and it will take a quite courageous government to rein them back in.
his solution to that structural impasse (for EVs at least) is household solar. Whether the oil crisis is going to create a different impasse in the form of less solar infrastructure available to buy globally is yet to be seen.
Agree about the power companies. Most of our problems are political not physical.
Someone should check his figures, but the kind of thinking and direction was refreshing.
He is excellent…great post.
But we also need "mega solar" farms with battery storage attached. Australia is doing both.
Spain is leading the way:
"Spain just completed its largest ever solar installation — a 3,000 megawatt farm in the Extremadura region that generates so much electricity during peak midday hours that it supplies the entire national grid for free, pushing electricity prices to zero or even negative values during sunny afternoons. The Solaria Extremadura complex covers 6,000 hectares of dry Extremadura plateau with 7 million bifacial solar panels on single-axis tracking systems that rotate east to west following the sun precisely throughout the day."
https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/spainenergy
China has a 23MW floating solar farm, according to the Listener 7 Feb 2026.
See also https://time.com/china-massive-floating-solar-field/
BG it's not like we are standing still.
– Twin Rivers Solar in Kaitaia is generating 24mw
– Taiohi Solar near Hamilton is generating 22 mw
– Pamu Ra Solar near Whitianga is generating 24mw
– Omeheu Ra Solar near Edgecumbe will generate 38mw
– Clandeboye Solar in South Canterbury will generate 28mw
– Tauhei Solar near Te Aroha will generate 150mw
– Ruakaka near Whangarei will generate 150mw + 100mw battery
– Te Rahui Solar south of Taupo will generate 400mw once fully built
Then you have :
– Slopedown in Southland which is wind and planned to generate 300mw, which is bigger than
– Turitea near Palmerston North which is the current biggest at 222mw
But then also on the fast track route is Lake Onslow which is of course a battery dam, and will generate up to 1,200mw
Last year we hit 96.4 electricity generation from renewable generation. Won't always be quite as good as that, but we're not sitting still for electricity renewables.
Renewable energy generation hits new high, gas at 46-year low | RNZ News
True Ad, a good list. And hopefully the 300 mw Helios solar farm in the Maniototo will be given consent too.
Unfortunately NZ has been very slow to adopt rooftop solar but even this is now starting to pick up.
What we need is more battery storage attached to these developments which will allay dry year fears. Batteries are a much better option than the climate unfriendly and very expensive LNG proposal. Onslow may also prove to be expensive compared with battery power which has halved in price in the last 5 years.
(Objectors to Helios solar farm said the battery proposed would be a fire risk so they canned it. Batteries are being installed all over Australia and Texas…no fire risks there of course.)
We may be very good at making electicity but we have been very slow to adopt it for vehicles-75% of imported oil is used on transportation. It’s the right time for EV incentives.
Are the COC still going ahead with the LNG Plant in the Taranaki ???
They are currently assessing the business case for the LNG plant. But it sounded like Luxon was getting cold feet the other day. The problem is that many dinosaurs sorry people in the COC are right behind it.
Cheers weka, great post.
I was fortunate to fall into the company of some hippies 30 years ago.
Two families were off grid mainly because of remote building sites but also a little bit 'f*** the man'.
Then the master Max Bradford came along with his reforms and my heart told me, when we relocated, it was time to go off grid. Back then it was $10 a watt installed nowadays it's closer to a dollar a watt installed.
Anyhoo, it is great to have the likes of Casey making the case from a dollar's point of view. I am in the throes of putting a proposal together for our local High School board to start putting solar on the roofs and switching lots of our water heating, vehicles and garden tools etc to electric.
Rewire Aotearoa will be a crucial part of that presentation.
If anyone else has other resources that may help the board see the light I would welcome them.
Funnily enough one of the biggest stumbling blocks to doing this is a Ministry of Education. If the school spends money on solar and lowers their power bill the ministry will just lower what they pay the school.
Schools are an ideal environment for solar panels as they are using the power during the day.
Some NZ schools forms standalone property trusts whose charitable purpose is decreasing the costs of education to children. Your school might want to look at renting their roof space to a standalone property trust who then donates the power back.
See this:
https://us2.campaign-archive.com/?e=0bcf22db73&u=7c733794100bcc7e083a163f0&id=43231b8888
It appears that New Zealand is further along the way to unfettered capitalism than Alabama – they appear to have community based organisations in their equivalent of lines companies – here we have Generators / Transpower / Lines companies, with only Transpower not taking a profit, but itself reliant on the Gen companies who take turns being top of the travellators continuously increasing prices, and the lines companies having erratic supply based on erratic users switching from battery to grid supply at random, causing problems through the need to cope with the switching process one way or the other.
Smart thinking.
Mike Casey's cherries are flown to Japan and China; it's a very high value crop.
Air fuel is where the big carbon challenge is now for AirNZ and for our other expensive food exports like crayfish.
Not just emissions but supply of avgas. The most potent thing I've read was the reference to the business owner sitting in a corner crying. Must be a few exporters shitting themselves right now.
On the upside, if the war is still going by Christmas, NZ will be able to eat a lot of cherries.
Thanks Ad and Ed for yr input.
The property trust renting roof space and donating the power back remains me of the Monty Python 'Machine that goes ping' sketch.
The Alabama power company story is horrible but it is corporate entities doing what corporates do. Privatise profits and socialize the costs/damage.
Onslow! "Bad idea" when we invest in it and get the benefit. "Good idea" when a private company pockets the returns. Right?
Rooftop solar is good for individual households.
But it comes up against economies of scale, if we are considering the best options for the country as a whole.
have a look at what is expected to happen to the grid with AF8. Localised energy is inherently more resilient. Good for individuals, families, neighbourhoods, communities.
The reason we think big is because we can't conceive of steady state. NZ can get fucked if it wants to dam another river to power a data centre in Southland. I'd like to see the argument for industrialising all of nature, at least that would be more honest. It's not that we can't do more large scale generation, it's that it's only going to be good if we do with the understanding that the physical world is finite. There is only so much land to appropriate, and we don't even know where too much is.
Grid scale solar, and wind, takes surprisingly little land.
Schools, factories and the like, can use their roofs.
You would be horrified how much fertile land biofuels require.
And yes, distributed solar adds to resiliance, but I would like to see the numbers for solar farms such as Marsden point, compared with residential solar. I strongly suspect, having done calculations for biofuel research, that we may be better subsidising larger installations than individual houses. You can still have distributed generation and local distribution.
Some interesting options from overseas where communities have built their own solar or wind farms. That, would be "one in the eye" for price gouging power companies.
no reason we can't have both 👍 Larger scale on industrial and built landscapes, and resiliency on all new builds and retrofits.
I'd be interested if you look at Casey's figures in the video on how to supply increased EV use, and how he says it can be paid for.
From AI:
"Rooftop solar is a resounding success in Australia, with over 4.2 million homes and small businesses installing 26.8 GW of capacity by June 2025, covering nearly one in three households. It is a global leader in adoption, with rooftop solar contributing 12.8% of total electricity generation in early 2025, driving significant emissions reductions and reducing household energy bills by roughly $1500"
That is more than 50 Clyde dams worth of power already. My understanding is that the Australian government/states usually offer subsidies and incentives for rooftop solar.
If you want to use AI here, please post the AI references (ask the AI for them if it's obvious). AI makes a significant amount of mistakes (or sometimes makes stuff up because its programmed to give user satisfaction), and we need the references to fact check in the same way as if it were a news article.
Fair enough…will do that in future. The link below backs up the AI search above, in fact it says rooftop solar in Oz is now 28.3 GW.
https://cleanenergycouncil.org.au/news-resources/rooftop-solar-and-storage-report-july-to-dec-2025
The AI output was mostly factual info that can be checked. However, its claim that this is a “resounding success in Australia” suggests bias; it’s a subjective claim by an unknown source based on unknown metrics & standards. Using this output as is also suggests confirmation bias.
None of this is particularly novel. We used to do our Google searches ourselves and ‘manually’ without the aid of AI (Gemini, in Google’s case) but with only a vague awareness & acceptance of Google’s search algorithms & result rankings. We used to paraphrase the content/message of the top hits, often only the first hit, in our own words if that hit(s) aligned with our own views. We may or may not have added ourselves the words “resounding success in Australia”, but these would have been our own words based on our own interpretation of Google’s result(s) and our own bias. With automated (default) AI outputs/overviews/summaries, we don’t have to think (much) about this anymore, we simply nod in agreement and copy & paste the AI words into our comment here on TS. So, our total level of engagement with the topic material has likely decreased because of AI.
All this raises the question whether this is good for (political) engagement, public discourse, and robust debate here on TS?
If yes, then there’s no problem really and we should encourage and do it more ourselves.
If no, then the question is what can and should we do about it?
It might be a bit of both …
Incog…I asked AI "has rooftop solar been a success in Australia." The bias was mine I guess, though I knew the answer.
Thanks. My point is that bias is likely to get amplified & propagated faster through [the use of] AI and that we should be aware of this phenomenon but bias per se is nothing new. My second point is that our level of engagement & cognitive challenge is likely to become more shallow through AI and this is a new aspect that we may not be sufficiently aware of. All a bit meta, I know.