26 Jun Charging ahead: Waiheke’s clean-energy initiative
Source: Gulf News – June 27, 2024
With power price increases once again on the horizon, a Waiheke solar energy sharing network is on a recruitment drive.
Waiheke Energy Share, or WE Share, started as a grassroots community project aiming to reduce the island’s carbon emissions and improve energy resilience with renewable solar power. It’s now run by a partnership of island solar technology company Energy Alternative and Our Energy, who have just finished a successful two-year pilot programme.
Energy Alternatives director Dana Darwin says the feedback from participants has been good and now they have a proof of concept, they’re on a drive to expand the network. The goal is to grow a network of solar-powered households across the island, where members can sell excess power or buy what they need locally for 12 cents per unit. Members also have the option to gift their extra power to friends, family or community organisations they want to support. While Energy Alternatives supplies the hardware and onsite support, Wellington-based company Our Energy provides the online platform to manage it – as it does for several similar community power-sharing networks already up and running across the country. Each house on the WE Share network has a unique ID, and users can monitor how much power they are generating, using or storing in their battery systems in real-time through the ‘My Generation’ app – which also allows them to manage options for any excess power.
Dana says there are currently 17 Waiheke households in WE Share, with six more in the process of getting the necessary solar panels and systems installed. Dana says every household and site has unique needs, so the systems have to be individually tailored based on factors like how much power they use, when they use the most power and how much solar power can be generated based on where their property sits – a house at the bottom of a deep valley is going to be in the shade longer and more often than one on top of a hill and so its solar panels would generate less power. Rahn Kitson’s Palm Beach home sits at the bottom of a leafy valley. He says before he joined WE Share a little over a year ago, his household of three adults, with two electric cars, used to pay roughly $170 per month for power on average – closer to $200 in winter. They still pay around that for three months in winter, Rahn says, because the only place for the solar panels was the roof and that’s in the shadow of the valley hills for all but a relatively brief window of time in the winter months. But in autumn and spring they pay $40 a month and for three months every summer they generate all the power they need themselves.
Rahn says the solar power system is basically paying for itself, and Energy Alternatives charged about $7000 less than mainland companies offering similar solar systems – with an additional discount for signing up to WE Share. Rahn says there is another benefit of the system, which his household enjoyed during the recent storm that took out power to Waiheke and most of the region. “When there’s a blackout, it switches to our batteries as a backup. So during that last storm we were still able to sit back watching Netflix, with lights and wi-fi and everything.”
The only thing they couldn’t do was cook dinner, since their electric stove draws too much power, he says.
• Paul Mitchell
