A regular series from Goodman Property examining environmental sustainability and how New Zealand business is working to get us there.
Today: Transport
The problem: Carbon emissions, global warming and climate change Issues: Professor Ralph Chapman, Victoria University's Director of Environmental Studies, says transport makes up 40 per cent of mankind's harmful emissions – and they have increased by 100 per cent over the last 30 years. Now, we must cut our emissions in half by 2030 because, if not, it will not be possible to achieve zero emissions by 2050 and the world will face grim consequences.
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Big switch to public transport will help NZ - & the planet - meet zero emission levels.
Millions of tonnes of carbon can be taken out of the atmosphere if – when – Auckland changes to electric ferries.
That's the call from Michael Eaglen, CEO of EV Maritime, which is building fast electric ferries, the first two of which will be in the water by mid-2023 with a bigger 400-person ferry also being developed.
"As a major lynchpin in our public transport sector, Auckland ferries pump out 34,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year," he says, "so if we can make them all battery-powered, it'll make a big difference."
Eaglen says EV Maritime, a small Auckland-based company dedicated to decarbonising the commercial marine sector, started with ferries because cities have a lot of them and because of large diesel use.
"Auckland alone uses about 13 million litres of diesel every year in its ferry fleet so we said, How do we get rid of that?"
Each fast ferry will save around a thousand tons of carbon per year, he says, and will be built from composite materials that will last a lot longer than current ferries: "So when you apply it out over the lifetime of the ferries, then we're talking millions of tons of carbon to be taken out of the Auckland transport emissions."
Eaglen, like the other Footprint guests (Chapman, Zilch CEO Kirsten Corson and ChargeNet CEO Steve West), was adamant that large-scale adoption of public transport and lessening dependence on cars was key to solving New Zealand's – and the world's – emissions problem, global warming and climate change.
Even though electrifying ferries would help, they still amount to only four per cent of the country's total emissions: "A much bigger impact is achieved by getting people out of their cars and on their bikes, on their feet and into public transport. We've got to decarbonise our economy by 2050. That means we've got to stop burning fossil fuels everywhere – and our goal grew to how do we develop ferries which can help solve that bigger problem?"
"Zero emissions, over time, that's going to become the driving, most important thing. It's going to be non-negotiable."
Chapman says the big problem is road transport: "That's far and away the biggest – cars on roads. Frankly, a lot of that is in urban areas where most people live. The way to go there I think is to try and reduce the number of trips that people take; shorten those trips – and one way you can do that is to make cities more compact and then offer good alternatives like walking and cycling within those more compact cities."
"Walking, cycling, public transport and more compact urban planning basically sums it up. That's the complement to switching to electric vehicles and really in an ideal world, you'd do both. You start by switching rapidly to electric vehicles and then you try and improve your public transport systems and get people into active travel, walking and cycling, e bikes – all those sort of options and don't own a car, just share one…"
Corson agrees. Zilch, based in Auckland and Christchurch, is a car sharing company pushing hard the idea of using a fully electric vehicle instead of owning one – and working to introduce car sharing fleets for company employees.
Christchurch City Council replaced 50 petrol cars and five electric cars with Zilch's car sharing programme: "That was really amazing because it has allowed over 100 businesses also to exit cars and use the service... It's amazing to see that change…they've saved over 300 tons of carbon [and] we've just hit over 10,000 trips in the cars."
Corson says that, while Kiwis love cars, they use them less than five per cent of the time; a third of our trips are less than 2km: "That's actually quite embarrassing. We need to grow public transport, we need to grow walking, cycling, car share, scooters because with our population growth, the answer for New Zealand isn't building more roads."
"Change is coming and, obviously, with climate change there is more pressure to create change because, if you look at emissions from agriculture or emissions from transport, transport is the easiest one to tackle. We've got this great opportunity to transition to cleaner forms of mobility."
West is chairman of ChargeNet, the company which has installed 270 charging stations up and down New Zealand to accommodate electric vehicles. He estimates that at least 30,000 tonnes of carbon is being replaced right now by people driving electric cars – and that the trend to EVs is growing fast.
"We had 500 EVs [in New Zealand] six years ago, now we're over 30,000. It won't be long until they're a quarter of the fleet, then they'll be half the fleet, then they'll be three quarters of the fleet."
Charging rates showed the savings that could be made over petrol vehicles, he says. It can cost $2-$3 to charge a Nissan Leaf overnight if night rates of power apply; the ChargeNet network costs about $6-$7 ("we charge more for the premium service"), a massive cost saving over petrol cars.
Footprint: Business Sustainability is a new podcast series from Newstalk ZB and Goodman Property. Episode 1: Transport is out now.