Electrify Queenstown – The Follow Up

A couple of weeks ago I was over in Queenstown for the Electrify Queenstown conference. Here are some of my notes.

“Electrify Queenstown is a three-day event that brings together community, business, government, and industry to accelerate the transition to a low-emissions, electrified future.

Our 2025 event was our biggest yet—with booked out speaker sessions, national media coverage, and incredible kōrero across key topics such as energy, transport, tourism, policy, and climate resilience.”

I have been researching energy and public policy for years now and having also relocated from the sub-tropical North of New Zealand (Auckland) to coastal North Otago I am much more incentivised to optimise and rethink energy use. It is cold here all year round and especially in the winter. With wind chill and rain and sometimes even snow ‘the weather’ is less of an abstract consideration that I have been used to.

On the first day of Electrify Queenstown I listened to presentations by Saul Griffith, Rod Drury, Jo Hendy, and Geoff Simmons. Saul is a hero innovator and prime mover behind Electrify the US and Electrify Australia. He didn’t pull any punches in making his assessment that on energy matters the US is “dead in the water.” He says that policy making there has been captured by a very few and unfortunately the the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Bills that Saul was very actively part of have now both been terminated.

It is very rare that we have access to someone as influential as Saul. He is Australian and more recently his efforts have been focussed there. It was a delight to have him in town and I enjoyed catching up with him the next day at the event. Rod Drury ( founder of Xero) and now a cyclist and electric boat owner based in Queenstown shared about his proposal for a gondola from the airport to the downtown of Queenstown. Once again – great to have some big idea thinking in the room but I couldn’t help wondering if he owns 1000 sections in Kingston as he mentioned that location a few times.

I am generally only in Queenstown for a very short time but this time I noticed the traffic congestion and this is one of the local issues that Rod and others are concerned about. The other biggie is AF8 – Alpine Fault 8. That is the electricity supply to Queenstown comes in on a single cable and in the event of major alpine fault the town / region needs to have emergency and other plans for resilience. That is where local energy generation, storage and network planning all needs to focus. I gather that Transpower is “doubling up” on the size of the cable and thereby adding some redundancy of supply.

“Jo Hendy is Chief Executive of New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission, where she leads independent advice to help the country move toward a low-emissions, climate-resilient future that works for everyone.” Jo’s talk was more high level but provided context in the absence of any proactivity from the current government. There were some politicians there and there was a panel later in the day that I will comment on a bit later.

Geoff Simmons who is ex treasury gave some of the hardest hitting notes and insights of the day. He is now Chief Economist – Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. As an ex-politician and a trained economist he was very impressive with the many slides that he presented. I hope to get a copy of that slide deck at some point and if I do I will post it up here.

Later in the day we have a politicians panel that included current Cabinet Minister for Energy ( who has the improbable name Simon Watt) from the National Party. Dr Megan Woods representing Labour and Scott Willis representing the Greens. It is disappointing that there are many easy wins that the government could achieve but it seems they have no ambition to make the quality of life better.

Mike Casey of Rewiring Aotearoa was at the conference and had a short speaking slot and some panel time later on. He made one of the most startling comments of the whole day. His comment that if you had installed a new gas heating system yesterday it would still be more economical to pull it out and switch to solar / wind & batteries the very next day ( I’m paraphrasing.) That struck me a key insight for the day.

OTOH – Rewiring Aotearoa is a lobby group and so that statement is probably exaggerated and you should check with your own local engineers as to what suits you in your climate. For instance heat pumps for hot water often need a new water cylinder (that bumps up the prices*) and they may not work as well in colder weather regions. * Switching to all electric may not save on short term costs at all but it does reduce carbon emissions and so a long term view needs to be taken. This is why subsidies and green loans are so important to help with transition costs.

Here are a couple of my notes from the next day. I posted a series of skeets over on Bluesky using the hash tag #electrifyqueenstown so you can check out some more of them. I was most impressed by the carbon fibre bike made by Alex Guichard.

I was mad keen to get one of those carbon fibre bikes because it is beautiful and light. I have a couple of analog bikes that I ride nearly every day but the electric bikes I’ve tried out are all clunky and heavy. The nice ones are super expensive. What Alex is doing is excellent design for what is essentially an electric hybrid gravel bike. I do want one but I also had a moment of truth right then.

I realised that because I live 110k from airport and 70k round trip to go to the supermarket I needed an electric car of some kind first. One week later I sold my car and bought an EV but because of ferry logistics I am still waiting for it to be delivered. I hope that next year I will have one of the Le Velo bikes too but for now I’m doing a small step to remove my old fossil fuelled car from the carbon equation.

I realised that since my annual distance covered was costing me $4k+ p.a that it would be very smart to use at least some of that $ to pay off an EV. A bit like that story regarding the gas heating. It works but the prices keep going up and you are just setting fire to your money.

It would be great if EV’s were more affordable but for now my objective was to get on the EV ladder and pleased to say that was my action plan and I am part of the way there. The photo at the top is me on day 2 with Dr Saul Griffith who is a good sport. My ear is fine now 🙂