Video: Hawke’s Bay business singled out by Prime Minister for work done in EV charging sector
A Hawke’s Bay business has been singled out by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon for the work it is doing in the EV charging sector.
In a recent visit to Hawke’s Bay, Luxon visited Red Phase Technologies in Onekawa - a company working on linking transmission companies with EV charging networks.
Luxon described Red Phase as an “incredible business of entrepreneurship that's solving a really difficult problem with some Kiwi smarts, making it actually very easy”.
He said that his company wanted to double the amount of renewable electricity in this country.
“We want to make sure that we can get more embracing of electric vehicles up and down the country. For that to happen, we need to be able to make sure that we get a charging network that is working and distributed well across the country.”
“And these guys here in Napier are really smart people, 20 smart people in this company, have actually found a way to interface between the transmission companies and the actual charging networks.”
Luxon said that it was exciting to see “tech happening for real in Napier with some of the biggest brains in the world here solving a problem that is a global problem.”
In response Red Phase Chief Growth Officer Mike Lazelle said that it was “fantastic” to have interest from the Prime Minister and the MP for Napier, Katie Nimon.
“What the Prime Minister saw today was a discussion with the team about how Red Phase came to be, our founding story and the technology we're building, and then he came downstairs and got a really close look at the technology we're building for New Zealand and for the power grids and to solve charging problem here.”
“What's special about our Red Phase technology is that we're solving the two core problems at the hub of charging, and then these are core problems at the hub of electrification.”
“Heat source and technology that solves not just the charging problem but the grid problem as well. How we solve it is by using very special technology that Napier has been the world leader of for more than 30 years, developing right here.”
“The special technology looks into the grid and can provide special solutions, special advanced control systems and algorithms to solve those issues for the power grids.”
Lazelle said Red Phase had brought together a team of world-class research and development engineers.
“What they're building is a combination of all of their skills come together, whether it's electrical backgrounds, mechanical, software, you name it, into a real hub team of experts to build a solution that no one else is really able to do.”
Speaking to media after visiting Red Phase Technologies in Napier this morning, Luxon said they had to focus on the economic management.
“When you're seeing economic mismanagement and economic vandalism on the scale that we've seen in the last six years, and I'm sorry to keep talking about it, but it is exceptionally unacceptable what has actually happened.”
“We have lost six years, and so we are now trying to play catch up, and we've got to get a lot of things right in our economic management, our fiscal management, and our government departments and our government spending so that we can actually get this country moving forward.”
