Aurora Energy and RCL explore community energy ‘blueprint’ for Homestead Bay

Aurora Energy has signed an agreement with developer RCL on the 2,800 lot Homestead Bay subdivision near Queenstown to determine the opportunity of designing community energy resources into the masterplan from the outset - a step that could become a nationwide blueprint for communities in the future.

Queenstown Lakes is one of the fastest-growing districts in New Zealand and Aurora Energy is working with RCL at Homestead Bay to test how household and community scale energy resources can complement traditional network investment to ensure the network is well positioned to support that growth.

The work will explore how smart EV charging and community scale battery storage can support the network and help manage winter peak demand, delaying the need for additional capacity investment, while delivering financial and resilience benefits for residents. The initial phase will investigate how community batteries, fed by rooftop solar across the development, could be operated as a virtual power plant by a third-party aggregator - exporting electricity back to the grid on behalf of the Homestead Bay residents, at the times of greatest value to both customers and the broader energy system. 

The scale of Homestead Bay means a new zone substation will ultimately be required. However, clever use of non-network solutions like community batteries could defer that investment for several years, reducing costs while maintaining reliability.

Aurora Energy CEO Richard Fletcher says the initiative reflects a wider shift in how lines companies are planning for the future.

“Queenstown Lakes is growing fast, and our job is to support that growth efficiently, resiliently and at the lowest acceptable cost to consumers,” says Richard. “Combined with community EV charging, Homestead Bay could become a blueprint for the subdivision of the future, where solar, batteries and EVs are designed in from day one, not bolted on afterwards.”

The Homestead Bay work sits alongside another battery innovation initiative being assessed by Aurora Energy.  The company is planning to pilot the use of scalable, re-deployable network batteries, initially situated in Glenorchy and designed to support local growth, improve reliability and resilience and provide flexibility to the wider network. Together, the two initiatives are helping Aurora Energy understand how community-scale and network-scale storage can be deployed across the Queenstown Lakes district.

Richard says this integrated network and solar, battery planning approach also feeds directly into Transpower’s and Aurora Energy’s longer-term grid planning, including how and when transmission upgrades into the region will need to be progressed.

“There is a bigger prize at stake from 2031 onwards,” Fletcher says. “If non-network solutions and distributed energy resources are properly planned for, incentivised and accessible, they can materially reduce the cost of meeting the region’s electrification ambitions - including how and when the transmission grid is upgraded. Getting this right would deliver significant savings to our customers over the long term.”

RCL CEO David Wightman says the collaboration reflects a more integrated approach to infrastructure in modern developments.

“Large scale developments like Homestead Bay let us think about energy infrastructure from the beginning,” David says. “Working with Aurora Energy on community scale energy solutions could deliver long term benefits for residents and the wider Queenstown community, including better use of renewable energy and more efficient investment in the network.”

The Homestead Bay feasibility work will assess technical, customer and economic considerations, and will inform how community energy resources and battery storage are integrated into both new developments and existing communities across the network.