FAQs
Queenstown has the opportunity to become the world’s first electrified destination city. A globally recognised postcard destination from the electrified future. We’re well-positioned with both climate ambition and energy prices to be the first to demonstrate accelerated climate action while saving on bills, improving resilience, and modernising the energy system. Not to mention Queenstown would be less reliant on foreign oil and more on locally generated kiwi electricity, reducing emissions and becoming a world leader on climate change.
The timing comes from a convergence of three opportunities and risks facing Queenstown. The opportunity of the electrification tipping point, the cost risk of the looming transmission line build, and the energy resilience risk posed by the Alpine Fault earthquake.
New Zealand is one of the first countries to cross the electrification tipping point, where going electric can save money and emissions simultaneously with all costs included. We showed this in this paper and this paper. This means now the only thing stopping New Zealanders having access to a much lower cost energy system is practical innovation - making it easy. This project aims to make the most of this unique opportunity New Zealand has to in one place innovate fast and then share those learnings to help the rest of the country do the same. Queenstown is even further passed this tipping point because it relies on even more expensive petrol and bottled gas pricing than most of New Zealand.
Simultaneously, Queenstown is on track to need a transmission line upgrade that could increase household bills by $500 per year and more for businesses. This could be pushed back, and the impact on bills lowered, by making the most of modern electricity innovation, like rooftop solar, batteries, and demand flexibility. Which takes us to the energy resilience risk posed by the Alpine Fault earthquake (AF8).
There’s about a 75% chance of the Alpine Fault earthquake happening in the next 50 years, and it is expected this could knock out electricity and road access to Queenstown for potentially weeks. If that happens, the only electricity option that will consistently come back without a connection is rooftop solar, and batteries to store it. Queenstown is not currently prepared for this risk from an energy perspective, so the installation of a resilient and low cost solar and battery systems across the district could simultaneously better prepare us and lower bills.
We see now as the opportunity for Queenstown to lean into the energy transition with courage and build a region with the lowest bills, lowest emissions, and highest resilience.
Plenty, in fact. New Zealand's sunlight resource is similar to the state of Victoria, Australia. Right now, Victoria has around 30% solar penetration, whereas New Zealand has around 3%. Otago has some of the most sunlight of any region of New Zealand.
In New Zealand, fossil fuel prices are among the highest in the world and due to continue rising. Grid electricity prices are also expected to increase too. Fortunately because electric machines are generally 3 - 4 times more efficient than their fossil fuel equivalents the effective productive price of electric energy is much lower. Even better, solar and batteries have been falling in price rapidly and solar is now the cheapest delivered electricity available to New Zealand homes and businesses. As prices rise, solar and batteries practically lock in the price of electricity into the future for many years, as they involve buying the energy upfront. The earlier you go electric, the more fossil fuel costs you avoid, and the more savings you can lock in.
Electric machines, batteries and solar panels require materials and energy to build, obviously, but this is dwarfed by the mind-boggling scale of extraction, consumption and wastefulness of fossil energy, which is mostly single-use and also very inefficient in comparison to electricity.
The recovery rates of materials in solar panels are already well over 90%. But even with a massive global roll out of solar, the amount of solar waste the world might plausibly produce up to 2050 is equivalent to the amount of coal ash already produced globally every single month. The world has access to all the materials it needs for an electrified economy, and it is the only realistic way to a much more circular and sustainable economy overall.
Scientific research indicates there is a 75% probability of an Alpine Fault earthquake occurring in the next 50 years, and there is a 4 out of 5 chance that it will be a magnitude 8+ event. If this happens, Queenstown could be cut off from both road access and electricity grid supply for weeks or even months. Having energy resilience through solar and batteries in our homes and on our businesses will help the region prepare for and deal with a loss of access to energy in the unfortunate event of an earthquake. Read more at https://af8.org.nz/