"You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone" — the lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi sprung to mind on Labour Day weekend when the power went out for many New Zealanders in the face of yet another severe storm.
Electricity supply is something many people take for granted.
It’s there at the flick of a switch, and we’ve come to rely on the supply to ensure the lights stay on, to bake a cake in the oven and put our clothes through the washing machine.
It’s easy to take all this for granted, but we sure notice when things don’t work, like in Southland when storm damage caused outages on the low voltage network around Labour Day.
The problem of more frequent severe weather underlines why we can’t simply take the power supply for granted.
That’s why the "Electrify Dunedin" group is pushing for the wider community to engage in the electrification transition.
It’s a volunteer-run community group aiming to help households save money and cut emissions, while building more resilience through a switch to efficient electric appliances and vehicles, and to solar and battery power.
One of the big goals laid out at the inaugural Electrify Dunedin event at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum on October 29 was to "electrify everyone", i.e. raise awareness about electrification and help others through the process.
I’ve been to a few community electrification events around the motu and am always impressed by the number of people who attend these events and are already engaged in the electrification journey.
People share ideas and tips, and there’s always someone who pulls out their phone to show us how much their solar panels are generating.
It’s not only the solar panels, it’s also the network we create.
When the Blueskin Energy Network (our local peer-to-peer electricity network) was running, people could get rewards for shifting their use of electricity, sharing benefits with neighbours.
We have hit the "electrification tipping point", as Rewiring chief executive Mike Casey puts it.
That is, our country must move away from use of fossil fuels and go fully electric (through renewable sources) or risk far higher costs and more instability in our power supply.
It now makes sense (in a "dollars and cents" way) to switch to electricity to power our homes, farms and most businesses.
Crucially, it also makes sense to lower our emissions.
So the next time you need to replace a machine, make it electric, saving emissions and cost. The really big gains come from replacing a gas califont with a hot water heat pump, a gas heater with a heat pump, or a fossil-fuelled vehicle with an electric vehicle.
What the recent storms showed was that true resilience comes from distributed energy generation like solar power and batteries at the household and farm level.
I was particularly impressed to learn that the council has launched a business support programme to bootstrap innovation for zero carbon.
Oh, and a special mention goes to Aurora Energy which sponsored the Electrify Dunedin event. Such energy in the room. It was electric!
