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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

PartnersJuly 12, 2023

The power meter helping you lower your carbon emissions

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Off-peak electricity is often greener and more affordable due to lower demand. A new Green Meter by Electric Kiwi shows consumers just how green their power is.

By now, most of us know the drill. Faced with the double-whammy of chilly winter temperatures and a skyrocketing cost of living, we’re eking out extra savings on our power bills by moving our electricity usage to times of day when prices are lower. If you’ve ever set yourself a mid-evening reminder to start the washing machine, run a bath, or plug in the EV, you’re among the hundreds of thousands of Kiwis regularly “load shifting” to take advantage of cheaper off-peak electricity on a time-of-use plan. 

It’s fairly widely understood that when there’s a lot of demand on the electricity grid – at breakfast time, for example, or when people are getting home from work – electricity is more expensive to generate. But fewer of us realise that the CO2 emissions of our electricity supply are also subject to peaks and troughs. That’s why Electric Kiwi built the Green Meter, a tool that helps consumers understand the predicted “greenness” of their electricity usage at any given time.

A wind turbine at Te Apiti wind farm in Manawatu Gorge (Image: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images)

Using recent emissions data, the Green Meter produces a constantly updated CO2 forecast for the Aotearoa electricity grid. Carbon emissions are ranked from “Betterest” (less than 50 tonnes of CO2/half hour) to “Worstest” (a scary 400+ tonnes of CO2 produced every half hour), with “Goodish” and “Okayish” somewhere in the middle. There’s also a Carbon Insights graph showing actual average emissions for the last few months, plus forecast data for the next few days. Just like with a weather report, the short-term forecast is very accurate; the longer range one a little less so. 

Peak carbon emissions often happen in tandem with peak demand on the grid. On a cold winter’s night, when most people are at home with the heating on, our renewable electricity sources (hydro, geothermal and wind) are less able to keep up with demand, and fossil fuel generation (e.g. coal) has to be called into service. But that’s far from the full story, according to Andy Cooper, Electric Kiwi’s chief customer officer. There’s also the supply side to think about. “Cold nights tend not to be a very good time for wind or solar energy” he says, “and while the lakes are full at the moment, when our water levels are low that’s also a worse time for carbon emissions.” Higher than usual emissions from electricity generation can be an issue in both summer and winter, and at any time of the day.  

As the country moves into its electrified future, concepts like load shifting and emissions monitoring are only going to become more important. The electric vehicle revolution is an unprecedented opportunity to “swap dirty, imported fuels for clean, homemade ones”, Cooper says. But the electrification of our vehicle fleet is also going to put a huge strain on the national grid, and the sooner the potential impacts are put on people’s radars, the better. “We need financial incentives, we need good information and we definitely need some clever technology to help consumers do load shifting at scale,” he says. “Because the cost of not doing that is that our networks probably won’t cope and our costs will skyrocket.” 

Creating a Green Meter is part of the effort to get consumers thinking about the carbon footprint of their electricity usage, and how small adjustments can make a big difference. Given that New Zealand’s energy supply is already predominantly renewable, load shifting is by far the best thing you can do to lower your electricity emissions further, Cooper says. He’s concerned that power companies selling “green certified” electricity are confusing the issue. “We’ve potentially got the most engaged customers in the country thinking that they should change power companies rather than change behaviour – in my opinion those companies need to have a good hard look at themselves.”

(Image: Tina Tiller)

The Green Meter is also laying the groundwork for an electricity innovation that hasn’t had as much attention as EVs, but could prove just as impactful. Within the next year or two, with the help of smart home technology, electricity suppliers like Electric Kiwi will be able to manage the supply of electricity to customers’ homes, allowing water heaters, EVs and other electricity-hungry devices to be charged at the lowest possible price and with the least impact on the climate. It’ll all be automated on the customer’s behalf. “I think ultimately that always proves to be the most successful option,” says Cooper. “The less people need to do, the better.”

And that’s where the Green Meter comes in. “We want more and more people to think about this stuff so that, as those automations come along, they’ll understand what’s going on and be ready to take part in those new propositions that make life easier, make things cheaper and help us meet our climate goals. So it’s a bit of a win-win.”

Because it’s a forecast of the entire electrical grid’s emissions, the Green Meter is relevant to every electricity consumer, whether they’re an Electric Kiwi customer or not. Why not wall it off? “I think when you’re in an industry like ours, you have a pretty big social responsibility to do the right thing for the country, rather than yourself,” says Cooper, who’s quick to admit that encouraging load shifting makes good business sense too. Anything that flattens electricity demand now helps reduce the need for expensive new electricity generation infrastructure in the future. 

If you’re on a time-of-use electricity plan, you already know the financial benefits of shifting your power use to times of day when demand is lower, and when fossil fuel-powered generation is likely lower too. But load shifting is about a lot more than just the effect on your back pocket – it’s also better for the environment, and for the health of the electricity grid as a whole. When you put it like that, having your bath an hour later seems a small price to pay.

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Images: Lauren Stewart
Images: Lauren Stewart

PartnersJuly 11, 2023

How happiness should – and does – influence our money decisions

Images: Lauren Stewart
Images: Lauren Stewart

Are the richest people the happiest? Professor Robert MacCulloch’s studies into the economics of happiness aim to answer this age-old question. He spoke to The Spinoff about why the answer is so important.

“Do we need to keep growing if economic growth isn’t driving happiness?” asks Robert MacCulloch. The University of Auckland Business School professor is a world leader in the area of “happiness economics”, which attempts to correlate people’s wellbeing with the wider state of the economy. 

To do this effectively, you need massive amounts of data. In one of MacCulloch’s landmark papers, published last year, he and two colleagues use data from the Gallup World Poll, which surveyed 1.5 million people in 141 countries over 14 years. Using different variables, this data was analysed alongside information about welfare and monetary policy, to figure out how movement in the economy impacted how people felt about their lives. 

The results were startling. For instance, the study found that becoming unemployed – much more likely to happen in a recession – made people feel six times worse than inflation, which creates rising costs. This information can be used to generate a model where you can estimate the impact on social welfare by inputting the amount of inflation or the rate of unemployment – an idea which might be vital for policy makers at central banks around the globe. “If you take these findings seriously you couldn’t try to bring down inflation by triggering a recession, you should bring it down more gradually,” says MacCulloch. “Unemployment causes real hardship.”

MacCulloch’s research, and the field of happiness economics more broadly, also raises profound questions about what an economy is for and what it means for a government to influence it. Do we want to live in an economy which produces wealth, or one that produces happiness? Or are they the same thing – line goes up, there are more jobs, less inflation, everyone is richer and more happy. “The single biggest question is ‘how does money affect happiness’”, MacCulloch says. “But nobody knows the answer.” 

In the short term, having more money does increase happiness, as studies of lottery winners often show. But in the longer term, especially for those with stable finances, does it make much difference whether you’re “middle-class” or “very rich”?

The data that MacCulloch works with, as a leader in the field of happiness economics for two decades, does show some markers about what makes people happy. “Having a stable job with a close and connected family group and good health are the main drivers of happiness, because they’re long-lasting.” 

Of course, an issue with all this data is that it’s based on correlation – and as many people have had drilled into them, correlation and causation are not the same. This is a major issue for economics studies that are focused on wellbeing, McCulloch says. If someone is depressed after losing their job, did they lose their job because they were sad and listless, or did losing their job cause them to feel that way?

“It’s a curse in economics – what you really want, like medics testing a drug, is a treatment and a control.” But a huge variety of factors go into the economy and people’s personal lives – and it’s not exactly ethical to make someone lose their job for the sake of an experiment. That said, there are some ways to see natural experiments – perhaps comparing a country with high rates of inflation with one that has less inflation, even if the overall per-capita GDP is the same. 

The other important factor in determining causation is being able to track different measures of the economy and wellbeing over time; for instance, to see how people felt 20 years ago – or 200. “We have millions of observations but they don’t go back all that far, maybe 20 years at most,” MacCulloch says. “It sounds silly, but it would be good to know how happy people felt in 1200 or 1700 – you need to track people for 200 years, through generations, to be able to see if people in this country or that country really are happier than they were a century ago.” On average, people in the world now are richer than at any point during history, so being able to ask an ancient Roman living in poverty how they felt about their life would offer a way to understand how wealth (and education and healthcare!) connects to wellbeing. 

Despite this, the gift of working with large datasets is that there’s more information all the time. When MacCulloch started studying happiness in the 90s, it would take hours for computers to crunch the numbers and establish the correlations he was trying to find. “There’s an unprecedented amount of information about people’s wellbeing”, MacCulloch says – at the least the computers now are faster to digest millions of variables and find associations between them. 

Ultimately, this research points to how understanding and interacting with the economy using different measures can offer unique ways to make policy that truly responds to people’s wellbeing. “There’s such a strong positive effect from social insurance, like the jobseekers benefit,” he says. His research draws a picture of understanding economics and business that goes beyond numbers and asks serious questions about how to distribute resources in a way that works for everyone. “When you think about how inflation and unemployment hurt people, it changes your approach to monetary policy.”

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