Low Carbon Kāpiti Blog

By Jake Roos, 21 October 2022

Solar photovoltaic panels have become a mass-market product whose deployment is now being driven by market forces instead of government subsidies. Aotearoa NZ never had subsidies for solar PV – we are reaping the benefits of those set in other countries, some decades ago, that led to development of the industry and the subsequent plunge in costs.

In 2021, the world installed 168GW of solar generating capacity. By contrast, the entire electricity generating capacity of NZ is 9.7GW.

Despite the pandemic, global solar capacity doubled in 3 years from 2018, bringing the world’s solar fleet to 1,000 gigawatts (GW) in April 2022.

[Read more…] about Solar PV on the Kāpiti Coast

By Paul Callister, 10 October 2022

This is the final blogpost of this series. It has been a collection of articles on local and national issues leading up to the local body elections. In this final post, we will look back at some of the themes we have covered and consider what it means to take responsibility as we face the future together.

While New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions are relatively small on a global scale, our per capita emissions are among the highest in the world. On average, each Kāpiti resident creates 6.3 tonnes of CO₂ per year. Over half of this is the result of transport.

Some international research suggests we need to quickly bring this down to a maximum of 1.5 tonnes CO₂ per year.

[Read more…] about Stepping up

By Sahra Kress, community midwife, 8 October 2022

“When we lose the Earth, if we lose the Earth,
oh how desperately we will long to go back to how it was.
 How we will wish that we had not taken all of this for granted”

Peter Kalmus, NASA scientist

And how we will wish that we had taken things more seriously, that we had absorbed the meaning of all the endless data and careful analyses, and that we had actually, collectively, taken responsibility.

These notes are my brief reflection on the bizarre climate predicament we are in: a slow-moving force that is pushing against the wall of our normality, which will push and push and at some point- our normality is going to crumble. What is the point of striving in the face of this? Solutions are very limited, so let’s talk about responses, and the meaning of sufficiency, and what living with simplicity might actually offer.

Burning urgency

The climate crisis is here. The ecological emergency is here. It is not something remote or possible in the future: ‘global weirding’ has become an everyday news reality and we are seeing unprecedented events becoming normal.

[Read more…] about Reflections on Sufficiency and Simplicity

By Paul Callister, 3 October 2022

Kāpiti consists of a series of villages and towns linked by the main state highway and the main trunk railway line. Many of the settlements were originally built near or around a railway station. The flat topography, transport layout and generally good weather means that most areas of housing are within relatively easy biking distance of shops and transport hubs.

Could our villages lead the transformation in Aotearoa New Zealand away from car dependency to a cycling friendly society? Could we match the rates of cycling seen in Holland, and increasingly in cities such as London, Paris and New York?  Towns and cities all over the world are being redesigned to encourage safe cycling. But in Holland it was not always like that. The campaign for safer cycling began in the 1930s.

[Read more…] about How Kāpiti could become the Holland of the South

By Graeme Mills, 30 September 2022

A potential wind electricity-generating project exists on the hills above Paekākāriki. The objective of the project is to provide renewable energy to the village of Paekākāriki, with surplus energy distributed via the local line network to other parts of Kāpiti.

It is hoped that the community would have an opportunity to invest in the Project and contribute to NZ’s sustainability targets in a meaningful way. However, it is unlikely (but not impossible) that the community would be able to fully fund the Project, and it would need a ‘cornerstone investor’ to make it happen, and to operate it on the electricity market. The total capital cost would be between $15 M and $20 M.

The project involves up to 5 wind turbines, with a combined output of 4.5 MW. We started taking wind speed measurements in 2014. The results of this and feasibility studies also undertaken confirmed that the project is a realistic opportunity and a competitive contender in the NZ electricity market.

[Read more…] about The Paekākāriki Wind Generation Project