Hill News August 2026 - Update from our MD, Dr Jonno Hill

As I write this, we are finishing the clean up after a complex and high-stakes piece of work which was delivered over the weekend – an upgrade to the power supply at our largest lab, located in Hamilton. This has been months in the planning, and included a full power shut down to the site, with generators used to keep essential operations running until the power was restored. A number of people worked some very long days to get an impressive amount of work completed over the weekend. We have a lot of delicate analytical equipment on site, so managing disruptions to our power supply are always a little anxiety inducing. Fortunately, our team nailed it, as essential operations ran uninterrupted, and everything else was brought back online quickly and in good order.   

The driver for upgrading our power supply is our intention to decarbonise our energy use at our Hamilton lab. It’s a large site – 7000 m2 – and we use a considerable amount of natural gas to power the fresh air units on the roof (which heat outside air which is brought into the building as part of our complicated air handling systems) as well as heat our soil drying ovens in our Agriculture section. Later this year we expect to replace the two gas-fired Fresh Air Units with heat pumps, and in the next couple of years our expectation is that our gas-fired ovens will be replaced with electrically-driven ones (designs are currently being developed). The increased energy use, however, will be substantial, hence the need to upgrade the power supply first. 

This, of course, is an illustrative example of what needs to happen at scale across the whole country, and in fact the world, as we move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. The amount of new infrastructure that will be required for generating and transmitting much more electricity is staggering. But, put quite simply, our fossil fuel reserves will run out eventually, and so moving to renewable energy is a question of when, not if. It would be great if nuclear fusion could be harnessed at scale to meet our energy needs (and especially great if the NZ startup company, OpenStar, features as part of that story!), but in the meantime, hydro, geothermal, solar and wind all do a good job, and so the solutions we need are already on hand. 

Here at Hill Labs, we ran some numbers to understand what the financial implications of decarbonising would be. So much of the analysis hinges on what the price of natural gas will be in the years ahead, and that’s impossible to foresee. We can reasonably assume, however, that it will rise, with price volatility at times. Our journey of decarbonisation requires significant up-front investment in hardware (new power infrastructure, more expensive FAUs, and new soil drying ovens) and considerable effort in managing the required changes, but the cost of electricity will be much cheaper than natural gas in the years to come. What will the payback period be and what will our ultimate return on investment be? We don’t know; the future is too uncertain. What we do know, however, is that decarbonising is the right thing to do, and it feels good to be investing in our future in this way.