In August 2021 we saw deliberate power cuts for approximately 20,000 homes, put in place from an inability to supply due to a lack of generation capacity!!!
But wait we can’t say that because the government has told us that it was actually just a mistake by the power generation companies and a further confusion in getting the message out to the lines company, of how much they needed to cut.
It was only supposed to affect a small number of homes not approximately 20,000.
But the fact of the matter is that for whatever reason, in whatever numbers, there was a need to cut power consumption to in the generators words “protect the network”!!!
The reality is that going forward with the current government’s plan to convert our energy use from fossil fuels over to electricity, without a credible plan of how they are going to ensure supply for the whole country, is just economic suicide and quite possibly will result in harm to some of the more vulnerable members of the community.
The only plan that we have seen from this government is to use power generated in off peak times to pump water into a man-made storage lake in the South Island, so that it can be used to run hydro generation in peak load demand times. The government is relying on the generation companies building sufficient green energy plants (wind turbines, Solar farms etc.) to service the increased demand rather than adequately planning to achieve their desired outcomes.
This will not achieve the desired outcomes without a massive increase in both the distribution and generation networks so as to allow electricity powered equipment to be used throughout New Zealand to replace fossil fueled equipment.
This government has made ideological based decisions to convert our vehicle fleet from internal combustion engines (ICE) to electric vehicles (EV’s) and as this conversion to EV’s happens, power demand will expand far beyond our current capacity to generate it.
Rolling blackouts will become the norm and there will be huge problems with people unable to charge their EV’s (there will not be any ICE generators available for home use) and therefore unable to travel (for example unable to drive to their place of employment).
This problem of electricity demand exceeding our limited ability to supply is going to be highly exacerbated by the government’s decision to arbitrarily ban natural gas exploration, shut down the use of local coal and the use of natural gas in the near future.
This is just another classic example of the current government’s ideological based decision making being totally removed from the reality of life with the population and the world environment paying the price for those ridiculous decisions!!!
We are currently importing millions of tonnes of dirty lower quality coal from Indonesia to allow the thermal station at Huntly to continue to produce enough electricity to keep the lights on 24hours a day as the hydro lakes have been at extremely low levels and this has hugely compromised hydro generation.
Our politicians are shutting down the use of coal fired industrial plants throughout NZ to save the planet!!! – Yeah Right!
Here’s a small sample of how many coal fired electricity generation plants there are in the world.
The EU has 468 plants building 27 more for a total of 495
Turkey has 56 plants building 93 more total 149
South Africa has 79 building 24 more total 103
India has 589 building 446 more total 1036
Philippines has 19 building 60 more total 79
South Korea has 58 building 26 more total 84
Japan has 90 building 45 more total 135
China has 2363 building 1171 more total 3534
We need to come to grips with reality. Stopping the use of coal fired industrial processes and banning any further oil and gas exploration is not helping save the planet it is in fact making it worse when you factor in the transportation of alternative fuels.
But here in New Zealand we have another option that will allow us time to develop adequate levels of sustainable generating systems while still producing enough electricity to keep the lights on without the need to import dirty coal from Indonesia.
Instead of filling our landfills with waste we can use that waste to produce power by incineration. Given the latest technology available, the relatively simple engineering needed to transform the Huntly Station to use waste, the availability of area for the processing of the waste, the existing transmission network and the existing rail network into the site, there will be less harm done to the environment from using waste as a fuel than there is from importing and using coal.
According to the Waste Hierarchy, the recovery of energy from waste is the next preferred method after recycling. Disposal to landfill is the least preferred method of waste management, yet it is the most widely used in Third World countries, and is current best practice in New Zealand.
The Auckland region produces approximately one and a half million tonnes of waste per year that mostly goes into landfills.
The government has committed to stopping the use of fossil fuels and converting to electricity use instead and given this focus on the use of electricity to replace the use of fossil fuels the demand for electricity is going to increase exponentially.
New Zealand currently does not have the capacity in sustainable generation of electricity to stop the use of thermal generation outright.
If the hydro lake levels drop significantly due to weather effects and the wind doesn’t blow at that time then we will need to rely on thermal generation or see rolling blackouts as happened in August this year.
We don’t currently have the infrastructure available to rely on sustainable generation at all times and without the use of thermal generation there will be times when the demand for electricity will outstrip supply and then we will be again faced with rolling blackouts.
There are many major cities such as Paris, Zurich, Vienna and London, which are converting waste into energy.
Many of these cities have the process of generating energy from waste as a key component in their waste management hierarchy thereby reducing their landfill requirements almost to zero.
The residual waste that would otherwise consigned to landfill uses technology to generate energy from the controlled burning of that waste. The generation plants burn the waste and convert the released heat into steam which is used to generate electricity. The latest filtering technology is used to ensure that the incineration systems comply with all emissions standards from their exhaust chimneys.
We are facing rising power prices, increasing energy demand and the eventual closing down of the natural gas supply which provides baseload power and solid waste levels are increasing alongside the increasing population.
The changing climate means there is the distinct possibility that our ever reliable sustainable hydro generation may become a lot more unreliable with the changing weather patterns and we will not have enough excess capacity to cope with the present demand under those circumstances, let alone with the projected increased demand from the current government policies.
It is imperative that we investigate the alternatives if we are going to be able to keep the lights on and the conversion of waste to energy has many more benefits than the use of coal fired generation.
Andy Loader