Power cut risk probably gone for the winter season
Transpower chief executive Alison Andrew is increasingly confident the lights and heat pumps will stay on across New Zealand this year.
That is after admitting electricity demand and supply got tighter than the national grid operator would have liked this winter.
‘‘Barring something unusual happening, we pretty much think we’re through the winter but give us a couple more weeks, and we’ll be more confident,’’ she says.
The state-owned enterprise called on power companies to up their generation several times over the past few months.
But Andrew says the industry responded on each occasion and there was only one day, on June 23, when it had to curtail demand by asking lines companies to remotely turn off some customers’ hot water cylinders.
Andrew says no-one should have noticed that intervention and ‘‘consumers wouldn’t have been affected’’, although there were a few reports of families being inconvenienced when their cylinders didn’t turn back on as they should.
Just how close the country came to power cuts has to be a matter of conjecture, given it would have taken an event that didn’t happen, such as at least one failure at a major plant power plant at the wrong time, to send the market into deficit.
The nervousness over electricity supplies this winter was largely down to a still-unexplained 3% increase in peak electricity demand that came after a long period when little new generating capacity has been added to the grid to cope with that.
Despite it being a relatively mild winter, the last 10 highest peaks on the electricity system during the last 10 years all occurred in the past 12 months, Andrew says.
Transpower is not sure exactly what was behind that, but population growth, the number of people working from home while their workplaces were also being heated, and a switch to electricity from other power sources such as gas could all be factors.
Andrew says Transpower is not expecting a lot of new generating capacity to be available next winter, with the possible exception of some power from Meridian Energy’s $498 million Harapaki wind farm, which is scheduled to start to come on stream from June.