Queenstown’s two new gondola projects breathe life into a stagnant energy economy

Rod Drury airs his frustration at a lack of New Zealand energy ambition

Rod Drury made a frustrated, even angry, speech at Queenstown’s Electrify conference on Monday this week. His target - New Zealand.

More specifically our lack of energy and vision. In the case of energy, he meant it literally.

Mr Drury, one of NZ’s very few actual entrepreneurs who built something of great value (Xero), was unforgiving as he attacked a lacklustre local tourism scene and an economy that seems to lack spark.

“I took my kids to Sydney over Easter. It was pumping. It made me feel sick. It was humming. If you’d come from Europe, why would you spend another three hours of flight time to come here?”

“Restaurants were open until 10.00 pm at night. They were absolutely full. Queues out the door. So it just really reminded me. We're so far away from everywhere else.”

What was impressive about Mr Drury’s speech was not just the vision of a more lively, dynamic and competitive Queenstown but he provided what he sees as the first part of the answer.

A gondola. $400 million of gondola. From Frankton to Queenstown. Whirring silently, using electricity, above the traffic. Attracting and helping tourists. Showing how clean energy can be used to engineer fundamental change.

• The Drury Queenstown gondola project map and terminal details.

Even more exciting was that there was also a Kiwi company at the conference that shared his vision. They want to build a new Queenstown gondola as well.

Two gondolas – with different budgets, different technologies, different scales. And the best bit – they can work together beautifully.

With no council involvement or ratepayer money.

Whoosh and Doppelmayr.

Whoosh is a New Zealand company that’s been working for some time on an innovative transport system that uses cable-moved cabins that behave like Uber cars. They can start and stop, be called from a phone app and go where they are needed. Again – using electricity.

Partnered with Alistair Porter of Remarkables Park, Whoosh will actually start building this year. It’s a modest start that will initially just go from the Remarkables Market down to the Kawarau River and then grow to form a loop around the shops and eventually extend up to the Remarkables ski field and to both Shotover Country and Lake Hayes Estate.

• Whoosh animation of how their system would operate in Frankton.

Whoosh CEO Dr Chris Allington is a little coy about the cost, but he reckons its around $5 million per kilometre so around $10 - $20 million for the initial Frankton project. It’s called the Frankton Connector.

Crux asked if he shared Rod Drury’s frustration at the slow pace, and sometimes, low energy of New Zealand’s business and tourism sectors.

“I've just had a chat to Rod. I congratulate them on what they're trying to do. We're all trying to achieve the same thing, get better, better transport for Queenstown. Free up the land, electrify the space, decarbonise, the whole transport network. And there's just different ways to go about it.

• The Whoosh vision - cable cars that behave like Ubers.

“Rod's vision there for let's get some tourists into Queenstown and, and get them off the road so they don't have to rent a car over here. It’s one hundred percent our vision as well. We have a bit more of a distributed network compared to the concentrated network that they are looking at doing, but the two work very well hand in hand.”

When we spoke with the NZ CEO of Doppelmayr Gareth Hayman, the favoured partner of Rod Drury’s group, he was equally positive about the ability to work with Whoosh.

“Yeah, that's the idea. To really have a multimodal network that can service everybody across the board and be able to integrate with all those other means of transport. So whether it's a bus or Whoosh, we are there to integrate.”

Doppelmayr is in some ways ahead of the game – and in some ways behind.

Ahead because they have other urban systems up and running in other parts of the world, behind because their project is more expensive and will take longer to build.

They are also ahead as they have just taken some key local people around the world to see other cable cars systems in action. Richard Saunders, CEO of the Otago Regional Council was on the trip as was Ross Copland who leads the Rod Drury backed enterprise.

• The ORC’s CEO Richard Saunders - part of the Copland/Drury project global trip hosted by Doppelmayr

But – will it all actually happen?

It looks like these two gondola systems will happen.

They have both already built up a useful amount of business backing and public profile. There’s no other exciting local projects that have the power to transform Queenstown, apart from Technology Queenstown (TQ) that will take longer to reach its potential target of being a $1 billion tech/diversification enterprise.

It’s also a local election year that could delay any projects, like TQ, that are linked to the Queenstown Lakes District Council’s future.

Two smart, electric gondolas with complementary technology would make Queenstown the focus of global attention around tourism and urban transport.

They could also become poster children for New Zealand private enterprise.