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the australian farmer
In New Zealand, the agricultural sector spends around $700 million on diesel every year and the price is expected to keep rising, but solar is now the cheapest form of electricity available to cus- tomers (7 cents per kilowatt-hour on your farm mortgage vs 35 cents per kilowatt-hour via the grid). When you think about it, it’s crazy that the sector is still so reliant on expensive, volatile, imported fossil fuel molecules for its tractors, motorbikes, pumps, and harvesters when we could instead be using cheap locally produced electrons generated on our farms and via our renewable grid to power more efficient electric machines. Based on our experience at Forest Lodge, our total operational savings are approximately $40,000 per year and we make approximately $20,000 per year from exporting during peak per- iods. With changes afoot to the sector that will more fairly rewarded export, something that we have advocated for strongly at Rewiring Aotearoa, the already impressive ROI could soon be even better. Farmers also have an opportunity to lower the price of electricity for everyone in New Zealand, which is something the sector should be embra- cing. In New Zealand, if all our 50,000 or so farms had mid-sized solar systems like ours, that would create 60 per cent more generation and using more solar during the day and through winter could help reduce the wholesale price by keeping water in our hydro dams. Despite increasing our electricity use by 900 per cent compared to the status quo to run all our electric machines on the orchard, we have not in- creased our peak usage (which is the main reason for expensive upgrades to poles and wires) and no new electricity infrastructure has been required. Around 80 per cent of the orchard’s electricity now comes from our own sources, which not only saves us money, but makes us much more resilient to power cuts or disasters. We also electrified our home and upgraded from fossil fuel appliances to heat pumps for heating and hot water, an induction cooktop and elec-
As an orchardist, I love low-hanging fruit and going electric is a prime example of that; a pro- ductivity hack that’s basically hiding in plain sight. Cheap, abundant fossil fuels have been central to human progress for centuries. But, as we’ve dis- covered on Forest Lodge, the energy you generate yourself will be the cheapest energy you can get and investing in solar and running electric ma- chines is one of the easiest ways to reduce your input costs and increase your bottom line.
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