Name: Focus: Solar is cheaper than ever so why aren’t more Kiwis getting on board?
Uploaded: 2025-01-02T21:09:24.000Z
Duration: 3 min 18 s
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A morning coffee and some household chores, courtesy of the sunshine outside.

Duncan Andrews and his family turned to solar a little under a year ago and has no regrets.

Adverbs of degree

It was kind of a decision that I looked at for a while, and there was a few questions I needed answering, but once I tidied up all those questions, it was a no-brainer for us really.

Cities like Auckland get approximately 2,000 hours of sunshine annually, with more in places like Nelson and the Bay of Plenty.

Despite this, and the savings up for grabs, the uptake of solar in New Zealand remains slow when compared to the rest of the world.

Coincidentally I did fly a drone around, I only noticed there are only a few properties over Auckland that have it.

If you look to the number of installs per connection, electricity connection, it's only 3% has solar, while in other countries in Europe, Australia, US, it's already 30-40%.

The UK now installs 17,000 systems a month, which is huge.

So if you put that into our population terms, that would be the same as doing around about 2,000 a month.

In New Zealand we do about 700 or 800 a month.

A big factor behind Kiwi's hesitancy is the cost.

A solar system for the average home comes with a price tag of around $25,000.

There's no current government subsidy on offer either.

For those wanting to buy outright, banks are instead coming to the table.

So if you have a mortgage at the bank or you are with a bank, then you can go to the bank and you get a 3-5 year loan for an interest-free or 1% interest on that loan.

Others, like Duncan, are opting for subscription-based plans paid off over 20 to 25 years.

There's no capital you have to pay towards it.

And obviously they do a full assessment of your property to see if it's actually worthwhile.

We own the kit, we maintain it, we insure it, we fix it if anything goes wrong.

So it's almost like substituting your power bill from your grid retailer with one from Solar Zero and leaving it all to us.

The cost of solar is getting more affordable though with the price of panels and batteries significantly down on a year ago.

And as technology progresses, the efficiency of panels will continue to improve.

There will be a point where it is really affordable for everyone.

At this moment, if you calculate, it is already the cheapest form of power.

And that's mainly because if you install a system, it will work for 25, 30 years.

Recent events also sparking conversation around the need for an alternative source of electricity.

Obviously we had the blackouts in 2021, and then Cyclone Gabriel came and we had blackouts for about a third of the people in the North Island.

So people have become a little bit more energy conscious.

I think energy is now becoming part of the dinner talk in terms of how we power our homes.

Hope's conversations around the dinner table will only continue so we see more houses looking like this soon.

 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology