Rewiring Aotearoa chief executive Mike Casey is the 2024 Otago Daily Times business leader of the year. He talks to business editor Sally Rae about shaping New Zealand for the future it deserves.
He is way more than just a megaphone.
In his acceptance speech at the Sustainable Business Awards in November where he was named transformational leadership winner, Mike Casey said he was ‘‘just a megaphone’’ for the incredibly hard work of the Rewiring Aotearoa team.
But the judges agreed he was much more than that, saying he was a tribute to the power of a first and a prime example of the way a successful demonstration project could change people’s perspectives.
Mr Casey is an entrepreneur who, with his wife Rebecca, created an all-electric cherry orchard Forest Lodge near Cromwell in 2019, and then found a way to scale up his impact after taking on the chief executive role at Rewiring Aotearoa.
Shouting electrification from the rooftops, he is is on a mission to turn New Zealand into a demonstration project and prove the country can become the world’s most electric economy.
Rewiring Aotearoa is working on energy, climate and electrification research, advocacy and supporting communities through the energy transition. It is primarily funded by a group of New Zealand-based philanthropists with a small chunk of funding generated through projects and donations from supporters.
The Caseys had previously traded their big city lives in Sydney for the quieter Central Otago countryside. A newcomer to the primary industries, Mr Casey was a software developer who started his career as a programmer at Westpac and Inland Revenue. In Sydney, he started GradConnection, a tech startup based on helping university students get into the right career, which was later sold to Seek.
The couple had wanted to return to New Zealand both to give back and to raise their family ‘‘in the best country in the world’’. New Zealand was settled on adventure — all Kiwis’ ancestors were voyagers — and they continued to go out an explore the world — ‘‘it’s in our DNA’’, he said.
When they found land they wanted to buy at Mt Pisa, it was not because they had decided they wanted to become orchardists. Rather it was a matter of finding something to do with that land. One thing led to another and the city-ites reinvented themselves as cherry farmers.
Forest Lodge, which the Caseys co-own with Euan and Rachel White, is believed to be the world’s first electrified zero fossil fuel fruit orchard and it includes New Zealand’s first electric tractor, imported from the United States last year.
The MK-V Monarch tractor, which was driver optional, was the 66th to come off the line at Monarch and the first to have been exported out of California by the billion-dollar tech startup.
Their cherry operation demonstrated what was possible with technology available now and illustrated how farmers could potentially sell their food and fibre at a premium to consumers who were willing to pay more for more sustainably produced goods. What he had discovered was it was hard to sell commodity products — farmers and growers being price-takers, rather than setting the price.
Forest Lodge is powered by a 100% electric setup which includes 21 electric machines, 216 solar panels on a ground-mounted array, and an advanced battery system that stored the energy produced.
The system is designed to capture the sun during its daily run and then store any surplus energy for later use. When the demand for electricity peaks, particularly during New Zealand’s harsh winters, that stored energy was exported back to the grid.
In the past four years, Forest Lodge has played host to 12,000 visitors, half of those over the past 12 months, while Mr Casey has spoken at more than 100 events and made more than 100 media appearances.
He was happy to open the gates to the orchard, saying for a long time, the primary sector in particular had been seen as climate negative, rather than positive.
But here was a primary sector entity which was leading the charge on electrification which ultimately drives down fossil fuels and lowers farm input costs — ‘‘that gets people curious’’.
Mr Casey was never a preacher — ‘‘you must never tell people what they should be doing’’ — rather, it was about showing people what he was doing and they were welcome to ‘‘take from this whatever you want’’ — ask as many questions and take as many photographs. Being more co-operative rather than competitive was when change was ultimately shifted.
Growing export-quality cherries was not something the Caseys could do by themselves; it took a huge amount of input from other growers and farmers. Many of his mates in the region were farmers, whether sheep and beef, dairy, or other orchardists, and all he was doing was providing them with a new input of ideas into their businesses.
The beautiful thing about the primary sector in New Zealand was that everyone was very supportive of each other and the farming sector around his own orchard was very generous with their time.
Asked how Mr Casey managed to fit in orchard work with his passion project, he said he was fortunate to have ‘‘pretty awesome’’ business partners who did a lot of the cherry work which allowed him to be very focused on Rewiring Aotearoa. But with the cherry harvest starting last week, it was all hands on deck.
Along with family time, Mr Casey had also been training for the Coast to Coast Longest Day, his second crack at the event and that was his counter-balance to all the human interaction.
Often climate action was not pro-business but he was a businessman so it was about pairing good smart business with climate action, and his goal was for New Zealand to be seen as a ‘‘beacon of light’’ on how to do that.
New Zealand has a long history of renewable electricity innovation. The world’s first all-electric home with the world’s first practical electric home water heater was designed by engineer Lloyd Mandeno and powered by renewable hydro electricity in the early days of New Zealand’s hydro electric boom.
About 1888, New Zealand had the southern hemisphere’s first electric public lighting in Reefton, and the world’s first electric gold dredge about 1890. In 1958, New Zealand built the world’s first wet steam geothermal electricity power station.
It was now at a point where fossil fuels in New Zealand were so expensive that it was about ensuring access to finance to take advantage of the technology. Regulatory change was needed — ‘‘fix red tape and regulation’’ — and Mr Casey was also fighting for households, farmers and businesses to be paid fairly for what they contributed to New Zealand’s energy system.
The message needed to get out about how impactful change could be and how impactful farmers could be in that change and how fast they could accelerate it.
‘‘Farmers actually are the key catalyst for making this happen.’’
For him, 2025 would be about making sure everything was in place so there would be an ‘‘absolutely massive’’ energy transition in 2026.
And the flipside of leading a business and leading impact was that was what made a good husband and father.
‘‘Come home and tell your kids you’re doing everything you can to make sure their future is a little bit brighter,’’ he said.
