Steve Evans

So effectively we've built two houses down in Lincoln, down in Christchurch, which are absolutely identical apart from one thing, which is that we put a 12 kilowatt hour solar array and Tesla battery system into one and created a partnership with a company called Octopus Energy.

And the view is that we will provide the customer with a zero electricity bill solution for at least five years.

So for us, it's just another part of the journey of how do we help our customers in this cost-living crisis?

How do we address people's confusion with solar and what it lends and is it worth it and all of those kind of things?

So we're announcing it today.

We're opening it up to the public as of tomorrow and hope that it will form the next part of the journey towards more people being able to explore this type of solution.

Well, the batteries themselves or the solar system itself is guaranteed for 10 and actually has a life of 25 years.

We chose five years just because customers don't necessarily want to be tied into a system with a particular provider for more than that five-year period.

So we believe that the process will continue on and on and the customer will continue to seek the benefit or reap the benefit of the system.

So the cost at the moment is just under $30,000.

We believe that means that the saving in our calculation is just over $3,000 a year.

So in simple terms, that means about a 10-year payback.

The reality of this pilot is that it was done without the benefit of further bulk discounts you'd get with the outscale that you'd get.

And so we envisage that those costs will come down.

However, the key thing from us is that

Our customers get the benefit of not having $3,000 in bills.

That means that either they have more money to spend on the things they like in life, or alternatively, we go to the banks and we say, look, your spend per month, per year is now down, and therefore the benefit should be in the way in which the banks look at funding.

Steve Evans, Fletcher Living Chief Executive.

No, this was the very first.

The evidence is going to come and bulldoze you.