Forget importing fossil fuels to meet our growing electricity needs – farmers have all the power they need right now, Mike Casey says.
The cherry farmer is chief executive of Rewiring Aotearoa, a group formed to help electrify New Zealand.
Casey installed a solar power system on his orchard and has been replacing the farm equipment with electric options where he can.
He told the Farmers Weekly In Focus podcast it was simply a sound business decision.
“The system generates about 150 megawatt hours, which at the average wholesale rate over the past five years, means it will generate $22,000 for the farm. The panels cost me just over $100,000 to install. So they’ve got a five-year complete capital payback period, which I think is super exciting.”
He said going solar is not just good for the business, but also the community and the country.
“That’s a really exciting narrative for farmers. Not only can we make money and make a different revenue stream and potentially just become more resilient business people, but we also have a new opportunity to lower the price of electricity and the price of energy for everyone in New Zealand, which is something that I think is something that we should be embracing and figuring out how to achieve as a sector.”
However, there are some infrastructure challenges that need to be addressed for this to happen.
“When you think about our national grid at the moment, it’s kind of like a national braided river, where everything flows from one thing and it’s split up over and over again until it reaches your farm. And now what we’re essentially doing is saying to that braided river, hey, we can push water upstream. It doesn’t really work. And so there needs to be a bunch of regulation and market design changes to not only allow, but actively encourage, the customers of New Zealand to become part of the infrastructure.”
Rewiring Aotearoa is running a survey at the moment in an effort to get an inventory of the machinery that’s on farm in New Zealand.
But Casey said focusing on barriers to electrification, such as the scarcity of options for large tractors and harvesters, misses the point.
“I wouldn’t be too caught up on the fact that we don’t have a 200 horsepower electric tractor yet. Focus on the technology that is available. The next time you come to making a machine purchase, you’ll be interested to see what new electric production is available. It doesn’t make much sense to buy a machine where the energy essentially comes from Saudi Arabia, when it could actually come from energy that you’ve generated yourself.”
