Watching the program on television Demolition New Zealand, seeing how they demolish buildings, structures either with mechanical means or explosives and prepare the sites for further use, is great. It’s good to see down to earth people doing these jobs using their expertise in demolition gained from practical on the job experience that can’t be taught in a class room. These demolition experts also are great recyclers too and sort out as much as possible that can be re-used.
They leave the sites in a state that is ready for the next use and this recycling of materials, while it is driven partly by the cost of dumping into landfills, still helps reduce the demand for scarce natural resources and the effects from producing materials from those resources.
It was also great to see how the explosives were used in the coal mining industry on the West Coast, to extract coal in a safe and sustainable way. It was pointed out how good the West Coast Coal is for use in the steel making industry & for use in power generation. The West Coast coal is now mined in a much more sustainable way than compared with the past and once the mining is completed, it is reinstated back to as close if not better than it was in its natural environment.
The Government has made a commitment that we will cease mining coal and using it in industrial processes within New Zealand and they are promoting change to electrification of these processes, yet New Zealand is importing much lower quality dirty coal from Indonesia for generation of power at Huntly due to the inability of the renewable generation methods to cope with demand.
My question to the government: Is this dirty coal being mined as sustainably as the West Coast Coal was being mined and are the mine sites in Indonesia being reinstated to the same standards as the West Coast mines are? We have some of the strictest rules through the RMA, so why not use our resources that are mined sustainable instead of resources from other countries that aren’t?
We heard from the presenter that the coal from the West Coast as a very high grade and was used in lots of industries to make high quality goods as well as to generate power when our renewable generation sites could not keep up with demand because of weather related issues.
Yet now we are importing dirty coal from Indonesia with all of the deleterious environmental effects that go with importation, just so we can keep the lights on. But that’s alright if we hide this unpalatable truth then we can look as if we have stopped mining coal and seriously reduced our environmental footprint as a result. This current governments version of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome.
Our electricity generation industry cannot keep up with demand at present without the use of coal fired generation in adverse weather conditions (i.e. not enough rain to fill the hydro lakes or not enough wind blowing at the right time to generate the power when it is needed).
We have the government charging full speed into the electrification of industry and transport to replace the use of fossil fuels yet they have given no real thought as to how we are going to reliably generate the electricity to supply our peak load demands, or in the case of very bad drought conditions etc, even supply enough electricity for normal day to day use outside of peak load periods.
This is another classic example of a government that lacks practical life experience making decisions based on ideology rather than practical implementation.
Peter Buckley
Co-Chairman P.L.U.G.
Primary Land Users Group