Finance Minister directs public service to freeze costs to screw down Govt share of GDP; Power prices explode as dry winter, gas shortages & renewable power investment drought create perfect storm
Nicola Willis will go down in history as a Minister of Finance, as hated and notorious as Ruth Richardson who wasn't called Ruthless for no reason. I feel so sorry for the "squeezed middle" who despite the pathetic tax cuts are suffering.
Funny how National can find money for their donors the landlords but the police, nurses and public servants don't have a chance. And cant wait for those rent decreases to start flowing through from those tax breaks given to landlords ;)
And Willis is SO serious about cutting government expenditure that she ensured the recent 10% staggered salary increase for MP's to be blocked ..... yeah right!!
there is NOTHING funny about the billions of dollars that the current government is now giving to residential rental property investors every year:
1) residential rental property owners are now allowed to deduct mortgage interest from their income before their income tax is calculated (this gives them a colossal financial advantage over people who are buying a dwelling for themself (and family) to live in)
2) the government is giving about 2.9 BILLION dollars a year accommodation supplement to residential rental property owners (tenants are only intermediaries).
And its not just the economy.... "Brown made no mention of the climate or emissions in his comments yesterday"... and also no mention of battery's nor cancelled battery projects.
How many hours of battery power do we need to back up intermittent renewables (i.e. Keep the lights on) in a dry year when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining?
I don't get to listen to the audio often enough but it's a wonderful accompaniment to what is sometimes frustrating but necessary listening. Helped my morning for sure!
It seems well worth commenting on the news of the yesterday (timber processing closing due to electricity market spot prices) and the Shane Jones electricity market beat up (end of podcast and RNZ Morning Report this morning).
It seems to me his solution could have merit at first glance. If regulation brings in a cap on spot prices, at least for at-risk industries, that's the appropriate stick that should happen to punish gen-tailers for not building appropriate levels of capacity (which is essentially profiteering as he suggests).
The potential to build is out there - Rewiring Aotearoa CE continues to promote this. https://x.com/FedFarmers/status/1820692322738475018 The scale of doing it on farms (or rural landscapes around those plants) with some batteries has plummeted and could accelerate. The price of rooftop solar may be ~3x higher before any connection challenges with the electricity network.
maybe we should go back to the model that worked - combine them all back in the Electricity NZ and run it as a public infrastructure - the market is the problem - it incentivizes underinvestment in capacity and price gouging.
Those challenges within the electricity network are already here. A friend who went through the hoops of trying to put on rooftop solar was declined in the end because the transformer at the end of his street could not handle any more generation.
Simeon Brown is being rather disingenuous by blaming/insulting Labour at the same time as he asks them to work co-operatively with him on....bringing in more gas!
Geoff Bertram's fix goes like this - really push decentralised local generation - solar panels on houses, small windmills, batteries; (re)-nationalise the hydro dams and run as battery storage for decentralised local generation; sell the power from the hydro dams at average cost price of hydro generation, plant maintenance and transmission lines (not the current pricing based on the most expensive power generation at the time).
The problem is they have an 'answer' for everything. It doesn't matter if it's wrong, they can find a way to justify everything, usually by way of blaming someone else. It's what they don't say that is most telling, and cruel. They don't care, and equally, I think, belligerently ignorant.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." The great philosopher, Groucho Marx
well it looks like the flaws in the old neoliberal economic dogma are finally manifesting themselves for even the blind to see. This isnt simply Nicola's fault - it is the consequences nearly four decades of severely flawed economic dogma being pushed on the nation. Now having sold off everything, imported millions of new residents to keep wages down and property prices up - we have finally got to the end of the road - everything has been run into the ground., all the capital value of investments made by previous generations cashed up and blown on lifestyle spending not investment in infrastructure = particularly energy infrastructure - and the brain drain in the public service started 40 years ago with the mass redundancies of the Douglas era - a career in the public service has been the career of last resort for a long time now and any talent that is left within that edifice will be packing their bags - as having seen Douglas's efforts to destroy the public service in the 1980's its the most talented that leaves first and those that need to be pushed out are all that remain.
except I'm working with great piles of poorly thought through regulations that seem to do more to bog down the wheels of progress rather than improve anything or make it more efficient - much of our regulatory process now is like Potemkin village - all facade and no substance. The politicians have been dumbing down our public service for years as it is my experience that politicians dont like having advisers that are smarter than they are - and we can see which direction the political talent pool is heading by the measure of the current crop in Parliament.
It will be fascinating (in a perverse kind of way) to watch the antics of how the coalition deals with the blowback to all this AUSTERITY as the next election looms. The coalition is already pushing the edges of acceptable behaviour and popularity is important, to populists. To be honest, I didn’t think the coalition would last this long. Luxon’s ability to eat and digest humble pie has taken me by complete surprise. It is perhaps his most outstanding achievement to date. Time will tell.
Exactly, gas was always going to run out at some point. Why has NZ not planned for this eventuality?
Labour had the NZ Battery project that was looking at different options to replace gas peaker plants, which were basically Onslow or a portfolio approach (a combination of different dispatchable energy storage options). But the new Coalition government cancelled this investigation before it could report on its findings.
Hi Mark I think filling in the potholes is first up before the building of the roads but another expenditure which also deletes funding for those essential services which you refer to.
Most likely the reason we have such a big problem with potholes is because of the even bigger problem with deficit maintaining/upgrading existing roads which mostly weren’t designed to take heavier heavy vehicles.
RONS should never be at the cost of maintenance of existing.
Our Finance Minister clearly has no understanding of basic economics and I wonder if her English course included reading? If so suggest she obtains a copy of Keynes “ General theory of Employment, interest and money”
I did the maths on 10PJ of gas (the current shortfall), we could replace it with approximately 500MW of wind or 1000MW of solar plus some extra battery support (100-200MW). The order of magnitude is much cheaper, easier, better, more robust than LNG or more natural gas.
Yes, and we could copy that but do better due to the significantly reduced cost of batteries. In the details grid scale and commercial scale solar usually has a lower LCOE but any version is cheaper than gas now. Let alone LNG which would cost billions to install infrastructure etc. Crazy!
Also, a politician with vision (do they exist?) would surely recognize that a country prone to natural disasters would be well served by a more decentralized generation network ie local communities with heaps of solar panels and local storage
Yes that is true for residential use but plenty of electricity is used for commercial and industrial users throughout the year. And hopefully much more industrial to come.
I’m not saying we can suddenly go to 100% renewable, and in fact I think I that aim was a mistake. I’m saying that with the right focus we could offset a lot of coal and gas baseload within a few years.
Yes I agree with chucking panels on as much as possible, just in general places like Auckland have a lot of shading issues in winter with the low sun angle.
Without having access to hard data it might be a good argument for wind over solar, even offshore wind, despite the higher LCOE if it’s provides more energy when it’s needed (winter evenings).
From Cory Doctorow: "In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power."
Yes I have been following energy vault which is putting in block stacking as batteries. They are a bit ugly but it looks like they are getting some traction in Middle East and china.
Imagine you have 500MW of wind generation and the wind stops, so you switch to battery power. For every 24hr the wind isn't blowing, you need 500 x 24 = 12,000MWh of battery storage, with a discharge capacity of 500MW, to replace it. The largest grid batteries in the world (e.g. the Victorian Big Battery) are not even close (450MWh storage, 300MW discharge).
The whole point is the grid in total will have gigawatts of wind, physically distributed, with batteries. The nominal new 500MW doesn’t exist in a vacuum (would be a s**t wind turbine if it did…).
So how many MWh of grid battery capacity do we need in total to make wind and solar reliable? Or putting the question another way, how many hours worth of stored energy do we need in order to prevent brown outs on a gloomy day with no wind and low hydro?
Again, none of what I am talking about involves turning off our existing gas capacity. I agree a
100% renewable grid (the Labour govt) goal in the short term is a bad idea.
I’m saying reduce gas usage for electricity generation from about 30PJ to 20PJ through the introduction of additional wind and solar (probably above what is being built already) that will produce electricity when it’s resource (sun/wind) is available and hydro and gas will continue to fill in the gaps. Batteries help here as they can plug small gaps quicker and more efficiently than starting and stopping peakers every 5 mins.
And what if it's hours? Or days? Like the week we're having right now? There's just no getting around the fact that intermittent renewables are useless without backup capacity on the same scale. Batteries won't cut it in a week like this, not even close
If you are interested the logic is 10PJ of gas makes approximately 5PJ of electricity, assuming most of the offset is TCC with about 60% efficiency and the rest from inefficient peakers. 5PJ is 1,388,888MWh which is an average production over a year of 160MW. Now solar and wind don’t run at full output all year, grid solar has a capacity factor of about 15% and wind about 40%. Hence to get an average of 160MW you need nominal capacity of 1066MW solar or 400MW wind. I rounded along the way, the point is the OoM not precision…
Now if nothing else changes on the grid these new plants will always export when they have production, independent of price. It won’t change our needs during peak when everything available, including Huntly coal and Taranaki peakers will run. But the rest of the year the price sensitive thermal plants (gas and coal) will produce less MWh as they ramp down to meet the lowered demand.
The trouble is capacity factor is a long term average, these are intermittent resources and the grid still needs to handle events from 0-100% duty on renewables. Battery technology isn't even close to viable, hydro and hvdc is too small, heavy loads already get switched off automatically (or businesses close down). So at present we need to back up any growth by intermittent renewables with additional equivalent thermal generation capable of fast ramp up/down (compromises thermal efficiency and incurs more duplication of transmission, maintenance, etc). Immense cost for questionable gain. All so we can consume more of everything.
because Onlsow was a really silly idea that would have produced no more power than we presently generate but the cost would cripple any energy investment strategy for decades - small scale pumped storage is a good idea but for the cost of Onslow NZ could build two dams on the lower clutha and dams on the lower waitaki that would have a lesser environmental impact, would generate more every year by a factor of two or three time's what Onslow would produce in the once in a decade dry year and Onslow would be useless if there were two dry years in a row (which happens) - so it would simply compound existing problems
Onslow is a great example of infrastructure investment strategy being driven by hobby horse not logic.
But you are right about stopping migration - our #1 problem is that consumption is growing faster than any energy strategy could keep up with - particularly starting on the back foot as we now find ourselves.
The fundamental problem NZ electricity system faces is a lack of stored energy. The hydro dams have a stored capacity of only 6 weeks. Other hydro dominated countries like Norway, Iceland, and Canada are many times more than that. Nee Zealand's lack of storage means that a few months of drier weather quickly runs down our energy stores (the gravitational potential energy of the water stored behind the hydro dams). Building more run of the river dams with little additional storage capacity like new Waitaki river system dams doesn't help solve our dry year problem.
Another issue NZ has with the dry problem is from the gentailers perspective it is a good problem. Electricity prices for all generators are set by the highest priced supplier. So gentailers are incentivised to not solve the dry year problem because when wholesale electricity prices spike, they make massive profits.
you are not quite right there Brendon re more run of the river - building two dams on the lower Clutha at Beaumont and Rongahere would increase the effective storage in Hawea by 50% by increasing the effective working head of the stored water. Same applies to the water stored in the upper waitaki (more so as potentially available working head in Waitaki is greater than in the Clutha. Also both upper catchments have significant potential for pumped storage to be included in each catchment - in the Clutha by pumping from Wanaka into Hawea - that is a very short route and the Pukaki - Tekapo canal was designed to flow both ways - these systems could be made to work much more effectively that they do at present and could easily generate 50% more power form the existing resource hydro leaves all other generation options out in the cold when it comes to output - but going back to earlier comments - the entire generating system needs to be put back together to operate as as single coherent whole before any of this can work- the electricity market is just a farce and energy is far tooo important to be left to profit making entities
No matter what pricing/market model system we use to run the electricity system we will need some new forms of energy storage capacity. In the past we have used gas peaker plants but our gas fields are running dry. The last government had the NZ Battery Project that was looking at the options, in particular Onslow versus a combined portfolio of storage options. Ciaran the new dams/pumped hydro options you mentioned above could fit into the portfolio approach.
There maybe some benefit in changing the market model for electricity supply. The current model does have some perverse under investment incentives for Gentaliers.
Nicola Willis will go down in history as a Minister of Finance, as hated and notorious as Ruth Richardson who wasn't called Ruthless for no reason. I feel so sorry for the "squeezed middle" who despite the pathetic tax cuts are suffering.
Funny how National can find money for their donors the landlords but the police, nurses and public servants don't have a chance. And cant wait for those rent decreases to start flowing through from those tax breaks given to landlords ;)
And Willis is SO serious about cutting government expenditure that she ensured the recent 10% staggered salary increase for MP's to be blocked ..... yeah right!!
there is NOTHING funny about the billions of dollars that the current government is now giving to residential rental property investors every year:
1) residential rental property owners are now allowed to deduct mortgage interest from their income before their income tax is calculated (this gives them a colossal financial advantage over people who are buying a dwelling for themself (and family) to live in)
2) the government is giving about 2.9 BILLION dollars a year accommodation supplement to residential rental property owners (tenants are only intermediaries).
I think Willis has surpassed ‘Ruthless’ Ruth already.
Ruthless implies some intellect/skill, that is sorely lacking with our current MoF
Love the birdsong in the background Bernard! Cheery background
And its not just the economy.... "Brown made no mention of the climate or emissions in his comments yesterday"... and also no mention of battery's nor cancelled battery projects.
How many hours of battery power do we need to back up intermittent renewables (i.e. Keep the lights on) in a dry year when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining?
Comment if the background birdsong too noisy or distracting! You're having a laugh 🤣
Ha! Thanks Kurt. I did have a few people who preferred it clean. Just checking. You're ok?
I don't get to listen to the audio often enough but it's a wonderful accompaniment to what is sometimes frustrating but necessary listening. Helped my morning for sure!
It seems well worth commenting on the news of the yesterday (timber processing closing due to electricity market spot prices) and the Shane Jones electricity market beat up (end of podcast and RNZ Morning Report this morning).
It seems to me his solution could have merit at first glance. If regulation brings in a cap on spot prices, at least for at-risk industries, that's the appropriate stick that should happen to punish gen-tailers for not building appropriate levels of capacity (which is essentially profiteering as he suggests).
The potential to build is out there - Rewiring Aotearoa CE continues to promote this. https://x.com/FedFarmers/status/1820692322738475018 The scale of doing it on farms (or rural landscapes around those plants) with some batteries has plummeted and could accelerate. The price of rooftop solar may be ~3x higher before any connection challenges with the electricity network.
maybe we should go back to the model that worked - combine them all back in the Electricity NZ and run it as a public infrastructure - the market is the problem - it incentivizes underinvestment in capacity and price gouging.
Problem is, as Bernard noted, the system has payed too much in dividends for successive govts to have changed it.
Those challenges within the electricity network are already here. A friend who went through the hoops of trying to put on rooftop solar was declined in the end because the transformer at the end of his street could not handle any more generation.
Geoff Bartram on RNZ <https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018950240/low-hydro-storage-affecting-power-prices-economist/> this morning is worth a listen. He reminds us that the greedy gentailers are doing exactly what they were designed to do and, by the way, the government is making megabucks in dividends and taxes from them at the same time.
Simeon Brown is being rather disingenuous by blaming/insulting Labour at the same time as he asks them to work co-operatively with him on....bringing in more gas!
Geoff Bertram's fix goes like this - really push decentralised local generation - solar panels on houses, small windmills, batteries; (re)-nationalise the hydro dams and run as battery storage for decentralised local generation; sell the power from the hydro dams at average cost price of hydro generation, plant maintenance and transmission lines (not the current pricing based on the most expensive power generation at the time).
The problem is they have an 'answer' for everything. It doesn't matter if it's wrong, they can find a way to justify everything, usually by way of blaming someone else. It's what they don't say that is most telling, and cruel. They don't care, and equally, I think, belligerently ignorant.
Wilfully, arrogantly, belligerently, ignorant; demonstrating all the worst aspects of short term action.
Or, perhaps cynically focused on pandering to their base voters and financial supporters to ensure election success in 2026
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." The great philosopher, Groucho Marx
well it looks like the flaws in the old neoliberal economic dogma are finally manifesting themselves for even the blind to see. This isnt simply Nicola's fault - it is the consequences nearly four decades of severely flawed economic dogma being pushed on the nation. Now having sold off everything, imported millions of new residents to keep wages down and property prices up - we have finally got to the end of the road - everything has been run into the ground., all the capital value of investments made by previous generations cashed up and blown on lifestyle spending not investment in infrastructure = particularly energy infrastructure - and the brain drain in the public service started 40 years ago with the mass redundancies of the Douglas era - a career in the public service has been the career of last resort for a long time now and any talent that is left within that edifice will be packing their bags - as having seen Douglas's efforts to destroy the public service in the 1980's its the most talented that leaves first and those that need to be pushed out are all that remain.
Yep, I’m pretty sure that harsh glare in the distance is reflecting off a big pile of cans.
Seems a tad harsh to thousands of Public Servants who do a great job with diminishing resources?
except I'm working with great piles of poorly thought through regulations that seem to do more to bog down the wheels of progress rather than improve anything or make it more efficient - much of our regulatory process now is like Potemkin village - all facade and no substance. The politicians have been dumbing down our public service for years as it is my experience that politicians dont like having advisers that are smarter than they are - and we can see which direction the political talent pool is heading by the measure of the current crop in Parliament.
It will be fascinating (in a perverse kind of way) to watch the antics of how the coalition deals with the blowback to all this AUSTERITY as the next election looms. The coalition is already pushing the edges of acceptable behaviour and popularity is important, to populists. To be honest, I didn’t think the coalition would last this long. Luxon’s ability to eat and digest humble pie has taken me by complete surprise. It is perhaps his most outstanding achievement to date. Time will tell.
Gentle wager that he gaps it before it gets to that point?
Dear me..how many years have experts stayed the need to stop relying on gas?
Exactly, gas was always going to run out at some point. Why has NZ not planned for this eventuality?
Labour had the NZ Battery project that was looking at different options to replace gas peaker plants, which were basically Onslow or a portfolio approach (a combination of different dispatchable energy storage options). But the new Coalition government cancelled this investigation before it could report on its findings.
Love the birdsong, not too distracting, great to hear the real natural world!
We are going to build roads instead of provide increased health, education and housing services for people in need. Yeah, that sounds right.
Gary Dyall
Hi Mark I think filling in the potholes is first up before the building of the roads but another expenditure which also deletes funding for those essential services which you refer to.
Most likely the reason we have such a big problem with potholes is because of the even bigger problem with deficit maintaining/upgrading existing roads which mostly weren’t designed to take heavier heavy vehicles.
RONS should never be at the cost of maintenance of existing.
Our Finance Minister clearly has no understanding of basic economics and I wonder if her English course included reading? If so suggest she obtains a copy of Keynes “ General theory of Employment, interest and money”
The birdsong is A+
It's a small point but does the word "bipartisan" make sense when there are more than two parties involved?
I did the maths on 10PJ of gas (the current shortfall), we could replace it with approximately 500MW of wind or 1000MW of solar plus some extra battery support (100-200MW). The order of magnitude is much cheaper, easier, better, more robust than LNG or more natural gas.
Yes. Australia has a surplus of electricity, thanks to their incentives for rooftop solar.
Yes, and we could copy that but do better due to the significantly reduced cost of batteries. In the details grid scale and commercial scale solar usually has a lower LCOE but any version is cheaper than gas now. Let alone LNG which would cost billions to install infrastructure etc. Crazy!
Also, a politician with vision (do they exist?) would surely recognize that a country prone to natural disasters would be well served by a more decentralized generation network ie local communities with heaps of solar panels and local storage
Yeah but think big energy scams is consistent with the history of the National Party.
Australia ( exp Tassie) also has a different energy demand compared to nz, their peaks are summer when there are longer sun hours for aircon, ours are winter for heating. https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/registers/charts/seasonal-peak-demand-regions
Yes that is true for residential use but plenty of electricity is used for commercial and industrial users throughout the year. And hopefully much more industrial to come.
I’m not saying we can suddenly go to 100% renewable, and in fact I think I that aim was a mistake. I’m saying that with the right focus we could offset a lot of coal and gas baseload within a few years.
Yes I agree with chucking panels on as much as possible, just in general places like Auckland have a lot of shading issues in winter with the low sun angle.
Without having access to hard data it might be a good argument for wind over solar, even offshore wind, despite the higher LCOE if it’s provides more energy when it’s needed (winter evenings).
True, but cooling is more energy demanding than heating so maybe it evens things.
From Cory Doctorow: "In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power."
Please let Shane Jones know!
Yes I have been following energy vault which is putting in block stacking as batteries. They are a bit ugly but it looks like they are getting some traction in Middle East and china.
Listen to that everyone!! Thank you Andrew -none so blind as those who will not see…..
Imagine you have 500MW of wind generation and the wind stops, so you switch to battery power. For every 24hr the wind isn't blowing, you need 500 x 24 = 12,000MWh of battery storage, with a discharge capacity of 500MW, to replace it. The largest grid batteries in the world (e.g. the Victorian Big Battery) are not even close (450MWh storage, 300MW discharge).
The whole point is the grid in total will have gigawatts of wind, physically distributed, with batteries. The nominal new 500MW doesn’t exist in a vacuum (would be a s**t wind turbine if it did…).
So how many MWh of grid battery capacity do we need in total to make wind and solar reliable? Or putting the question another way, how many hours worth of stored energy do we need in order to prevent brown outs on a gloomy day with no wind and low hydro?
Again, none of what I am talking about involves turning off our existing gas capacity. I agree a
100% renewable grid (the Labour govt) goal in the short term is a bad idea.
I’m saying reduce gas usage for electricity generation from about 30PJ to 20PJ through the introduction of additional wind and solar (probably above what is being built already) that will produce electricity when it’s resource (sun/wind) is available and hydro and gas will continue to fill in the gaps. Batteries help here as they can plug small gaps quicker and more efficiently than starting and stopping peakers every 5 mins.
And what if it's hours? Or days? Like the week we're having right now? There's just no getting around the fact that intermittent renewables are useless without backup capacity on the same scale. Batteries won't cut it in a week like this, not even close
Yes I agree. If all of the NZ is covered in cloud with no wind for a whole week that will be a problem.
And you know what, when thermal power plants have unplanned downtime - guess what happens?
Surely we can get more baseload from the likes of geothermal to fill in at least some of the gaps.. https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/mercury-breaks-ground-on-50-mw-nga-tamariki-geothermal-power-plant-expansion/
https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/geothermal-power-plant-in-tauhara-new-zealand-starts-operations/
excellent comment (provided your maths is correct - I don't have the knowledge to check it).
It's not. The battery estimate is enough to power a city like Nelson for about 1 hour, if the sun and wind die.
Why are we turning off the existing generators?
If you are interested the logic is 10PJ of gas makes approximately 5PJ of electricity, assuming most of the offset is TCC with about 60% efficiency and the rest from inefficient peakers. 5PJ is 1,388,888MWh which is an average production over a year of 160MW. Now solar and wind don’t run at full output all year, grid solar has a capacity factor of about 15% and wind about 40%. Hence to get an average of 160MW you need nominal capacity of 1066MW solar or 400MW wind. I rounded along the way, the point is the OoM not precision…
Now if nothing else changes on the grid these new plants will always export when they have production, independent of price. It won’t change our needs during peak when everything available, including Huntly coal and Taranaki peakers will run. But the rest of the year the price sensitive thermal plants (gas and coal) will produce less MWh as they ramp down to meet the lowered demand.
The trouble is capacity factor is a long term average, these are intermittent resources and the grid still needs to handle events from 0-100% duty on renewables. Battery technology isn't even close to viable, hydro and hvdc is too small, heavy loads already get switched off automatically (or businesses close down). So at present we need to back up any growth by intermittent renewables with additional equivalent thermal generation capable of fast ramp up/down (compromises thermal efficiency and incurs more duplication of transmission, maintenance, etc). Immense cost for questionable gain. All so we can consume more of everything.
With rising unemployment has Immigration been told to stop letting so many people into the country?
Has Parliament been told there is a freeze on their current baseline levels? No pay rises for MP's this year.
Remind me again why Lake Onslow was scrapped.
because Onlsow was a really silly idea that would have produced no more power than we presently generate but the cost would cripple any energy investment strategy for decades - small scale pumped storage is a good idea but for the cost of Onslow NZ could build two dams on the lower clutha and dams on the lower waitaki that would have a lesser environmental impact, would generate more every year by a factor of two or three time's what Onslow would produce in the once in a decade dry year and Onslow would be useless if there were two dry years in a row (which happens) - so it would simply compound existing problems
Onslow is a great example of infrastructure investment strategy being driven by hobby horse not logic.
But you are right about stopping migration - our #1 problem is that consumption is growing faster than any energy strategy could keep up with - particularly starting on the back foot as we now find ourselves.
The fundamental problem NZ electricity system faces is a lack of stored energy. The hydro dams have a stored capacity of only 6 weeks. Other hydro dominated countries like Norway, Iceland, and Canada are many times more than that. Nee Zealand's lack of storage means that a few months of drier weather quickly runs down our energy stores (the gravitational potential energy of the water stored behind the hydro dams). Building more run of the river dams with little additional storage capacity like new Waitaki river system dams doesn't help solve our dry year problem.
Another issue NZ has with the dry problem is from the gentailers perspective it is a good problem. Electricity prices for all generators are set by the highest priced supplier. So gentailers are incentivised to not solve the dry year problem because when wholesale electricity prices spike, they make massive profits.
you are not quite right there Brendon re more run of the river - building two dams on the lower Clutha at Beaumont and Rongahere would increase the effective storage in Hawea by 50% by increasing the effective working head of the stored water. Same applies to the water stored in the upper waitaki (more so as potentially available working head in Waitaki is greater than in the Clutha. Also both upper catchments have significant potential for pumped storage to be included in each catchment - in the Clutha by pumping from Wanaka into Hawea - that is a very short route and the Pukaki - Tekapo canal was designed to flow both ways - these systems could be made to work much more effectively that they do at present and could easily generate 50% more power form the existing resource hydro leaves all other generation options out in the cold when it comes to output - but going back to earlier comments - the entire generating system needs to be put back together to operate as as single coherent whole before any of this can work- the electricity market is just a farce and energy is far tooo important to be left to profit making entities
No matter what pricing/market model system we use to run the electricity system we will need some new forms of energy storage capacity. In the past we have used gas peaker plants but our gas fields are running dry. The last government had the NZ Battery Project that was looking at the options, in particular Onslow versus a combined portfolio of storage options. Ciaran the new dams/pumped hydro options you mentioned above could fit into the portfolio approach.
There maybe some benefit in changing the market model for electricity supply. The current model does have some perverse under investment incentives for Gentaliers.