Ollie Hill, New Zealand country manager for French multinational Schneider Electric, said New Zealand had the ingredients to be a clean energy leader, but getting there may take more than building new generation.
“It will also require smarter use of energy, better visibility over demand, more flexibility across the system, and practical investment in storage, efficiency and resilience,” he told the Herald.
Schneider, which specialises in energy management systems for big industrial sites and process automation, bought New Zealand electrical components maker PDL in 2001.
“Data centres are big for us, and the dairy sector is big,” Hill said.
“It’s a fascinating time because technology is changing how energy works.
“People talk about how much energy they [data centres] use but they can produce energy as well, because they have huge generators to make sure they can run without the grid.
“These are people who can be active participants in the system if we get the smarts right and the settings right, and the utilities give enough value for what they can do on the grid.”
Grid stability is key, along with balancing demand and supply, he said.
“So with all of these things, you just need to get a lot smarter because you can’t have the old system anymore, so that’s a big area that we can play in.”
Hill said New Zealand had one of the best geographies in the world for renewable energy – hydro, wind, solar and geothermal.
Against that background, the country had potential to “export” that energy through data centres.
“If you bring data centres in, people will pay you for that energy.”
New Zealand offered opportunity for data centres because of its sustainable energy supply and cooler temperatures.
He noted the community pushback on data centres, particularly in the US.
“I think there is a risk that we take a US narrative, or another country’s narrative, on data centres and apply it to New Zealand,“ he said.
“A lot of things over there happen at breakneck speed, and they’re using a lot of water.”
Schneider Electric’s Ollie Hill says New Zealand has the ingredients to be a clean energy leader.
Data centres built here tend to be “closed loop” – when the water is circulated, cooled and then reused.
Hill noted the surge in construction of renewables projects as New Zealand scrambles to add generation in the face of sharply declining gas supplies, and that a number of solar buildouts were underway.
There was growth in rooftop solar too, but Hill said it was not enough to “do the job” by itself.
“We need grid-scale solar, and we need businesses to invest in micro-grids as well.”
A micro-grid is where power is generated, used and stored on site, but connected to the grid to allow the owner to ride out the peaks and troughs, and participate in the electricity market as well.
Hill said Australia had taken pressure off the national grid in times of peak demand after it introduced a battery subsidy for home owners.
A Reuters news agency report said thousands of Aussies spent a collective A$8.69 billion ($10.6b) on home batteries in the five months to May.
The splurge followed the Government’s decision last December to more than triple the value of its Cheaper Home Batteries Programme announced last July to A$7.2b over four years, the agency said.