In 2018, Craig Simpson had had enough.
Tired of his life in the city running an IT company, he packed his things and moved to a 100 acre section overlooking the Kaipara Harbour.
It’s a classic Kiwi tale – he built himself a little cabin on an old farm in Tinopai, and began assembling the life rural.
But when it came time to ring Northpower and get hooked up to some electricity, he was stunned to hear it would cost him a whopping $90,000.
An address down a long private road to an isolated back block meant the job would involve extending the power lines.
He turned to other options. Solar power could work, but installation fees were still eye-watering.
“I thought I’d go solar but back then it was actually quite difficult to do it yourself,” he said. “I couldn’t find anyone who could sell me a complete system. That’s when I thought I’m going to build myself a little kit and learn everything I needed to.”
He enlisted the help of his electrical engineer son and an old colleague, and together they put together a DIY solar power kit by buying each of the pieces separately.
“That’s when I wondered how many people want to do the same thing as me,” he said.
It turns out the answer is a lot.
He started selling kit sets with detailed instructions online, and they flew off the digital shelf.
“We put them on Trade Me and they sold instantly, people wanted to go off grid and they want to do it cheaply.”
The new company, named GridFree, made $100,000 in the first year, then $200,000 the next. Then $400,000. Then they were breaking a million a year.
“It appeared there was this huge untapped market out there,” Simpson said.
Simpson credits that in part to the rapid advances of solar power technology in the last few years.
“It was just in the last couple of years that the panels got to a certain size and the batteries got to a certain efficiency where you could live as if on the grid at a reasonable price point,” he said.
He said there’s still a bit of mindful consumption needed in the winter months, when sunlight is a scarcity. It also means spreading the energy load – using gas for cooking, or a fireplace for heat.
But most of the year, his solar system keeps the lights on and the WiFi connected even out on a remote peninsula in the Kaipara Harbour.
Simpson also created a Facebook group for Kiwis off the grid, expecting about 10,000 people to join. He said there was now 157,000 people in the group.
Electricity authority data from October of last year showed 43,641 solar systems had been installed across New Zealand, representing just under one percent of the country’s power consumption.
Data from the Climate Change Commission posits decreasing technology costs could see that increase to up to six percent by 2035.
Simpson said the uptake of solar power dovetailed with the rise of tiny homes and technology such as Starlink, which makes it easier for isolated locations to connect to the internet with satellites.
“It’s trendy now to be off grid,” he said. “The whole suburban dream is not what it used to be. It is very hard to get into a suburban house around Auckland, and I just think there’s a bunch of people trying to get out.”
He said the pandemic years showed many that it was possible and socially acceptable to work remotely.
“We boomed during Covid,” he said. “An enormous amount of people decided that city or urban living wasn’t for them during Covid. Covid also drove remote working and that freed up a lot of options for people. Let’s just say you were living in South Auckland and working remotely, you’d say why am I in South Auckland if I am no longer needing to go into the city?”
But there are a range of groups he has identified that are going off grid.
Wealthy urbanists getting out of the city is one, but there are also groups like Māori returning to hapu or whanau land.
“I talk to a few customers and they go it’s okay to go back to the whenua, but everyone has to live next to the road because that’s where the power poles are,” he said.
Simpson hopes the solar kits will make a move to solar more accessible across the board, rather than just those with cash to spare.
Brilliant. And why is NZ govt not promoting these ideas and kits? Oh, can’t do that, might upset a few donors or the people who receive such dividends from the power companies who are busy overcharging the less well off in the country.
Hmm, taxpayers own 51% of the Gentailers. However, improving the grids resilience by helping people and businesses into solar and batteries would reduce the peak period requirements and hence reduce some of the the huge infrastructure upgrade costs we’ll be looking at in the future.