| 9 T TVirginia Wright Delivering solar power nationwide Lodestone Energy’s vision is to invest anywhere from $50m to $70m to build a solar farm in a community, wherever it might be, then sell the energy to local houses and small businesses. Lodestone Energy REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT Established in 2019, Lodestone Energy is a renewable-energy generation and electricity retail company that’s on a mis‑ sion to harness the sun’s energy and directly connect solar power with commercial, agricul‑ tural and residential consumers through its large-scale solar farms to be built throughout New Zealand Managing director, Gary Holden, has been involved in the energy sector for over 30 years. He originally came to New Zealand from Canada in 1992 to develop and build the two independent power plants that signaled the country’s first move towards deregulating electricity. As the representative of the free market, Gary was invited on to the seven-strong government committee, established by then Prime Minister Jim Bolger, and was charged with designing the independent energy market, along with representatives from two State Owned Enterprises: the lines company Transpower, and ECNZ (Electricity Corporation New Zealand), Major Electricity Users Group (MEUG), and the Electricity Networks Associa‑ tion (ENA). The work done by that committee provided the essential ingredients for the distribution of renewable energy, which is coming into its own 30 years later. “All of the tools that we designed 30 years ago have come into play to give us the ability we have now to build a solar-powered genera‑ tion plant in a community and sell the energy locally,” says Gary. As the CEO of Pulse Energy for seven years, Gary was focused on how solar could be intro‑ duced to the market at the right time. In 2019, he and another investor, Guy Haddleton, got the ball rolling, then, with the help of another 24 high net worth New Zealanders, raised the capital to establish Lodestone. Their vision is to invest anywhere from $50m to $70m to build a solar farm in a community, wherever it might be, then sell the energy to local houses and small businesses. That’s exactly what’s underway this year in Central Hawke’s Bay. Rather than selling the energy their solar farm is generating to an existing retailer, such as Genesis or Contact, which would then onsell it, Lodestone works with local lines compa‑ nies to sell directly to the consumer. “We made that strategic decision because we want the consumers to have all the benefit without running it through a third party,” says Gary. “That’s what I’m most proud of with Lodestone is that we could put together the business structure to be able to convey that lower cost directly.” Lodestone takes full responsibility for managing the generation and availability of electricity wherever they are, regardless of the weather. From their point of view, New Zea‑ land operates as one big battery, which they feed into or draw out of, depending on what’s being generated and what the demands are moment by moment. They work with consumers to estimate their annual consumption and how many solar panels’ worth of power that equates to, which they build into a competitive price. It’s exactly the sort of scenario envisaged 30 years ago. “We were not sure back then what the tech‑ nology would be,” Gary says. “We used to joke that maybe we’d have portable nuclear stations in our garages, but the committee set the stage with things like location-based pricing and metering every half hour, which meant that when distributed generation became viable, we would be ready. “Now that solar and batteries are here, on rooftops and solar farms, consumers can take advantage of the lower cost. “When used in electric cars, solar is now the cheapest form of energy ever created. You can capture energy from the sun, run it through a panel and, if you put it in an electric car, it can be as low as the equivalent of 15 cents a litre.”
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