Transpower: Climate fight lessons from lockdown

Transpower says electricity use has ticked up compared to last winter due to new work patterns.

Chief executive Alison Andrew said power use dipped sharply as businesses cut use during the level 4 lockdown but since restrictions have been lifted there’s been a slight increase in use.

Although the data is early, she said this could be attributed to large numbers of people still working from home — and turning on heaters — while workplaces are also up and running and using the usual amount of electricity.

The state-owned enterprise released a major report on the country’s energy future in the week after it went into lockdown and she said while it was still too early to know if forecasts needed to be updated, there were clear lessons the country could learn from Covid-19.

Transpower believes the economy will be increasingly electrified, driven mainly by the rapid shift to electric vehicles and away from coal boilers and heaters in public buildings and factories.

Andrew said now was the ideal time to act on climate change by capitalising on New Zealand’s renewable energy advantage, even if it was difficult to see beyond the impact of the pandemic.

“It’s acute, it’s right here, right now and it’s in our face. Something like climate change is chronic — it’s going to be as dramatic if not more but it’s taking time to build,” she said.

”I’m hoping that people will be able to maintain that ‘and’ perspective rather than the ‘or’ perspective.”

A contestable public fund could provide capital for the large green projects that were needed as power use started to climb from 2025.

The report states household energy bills will fall by as much as 25 per cent, driven by the falling cost of transport due to a forecast rapid uptake of electric vehicles.

New Zealand has a target of 100 per cent renewable generation by 2035.

It showed that about 40 new, gridscale generation and batteries projects would be required before 2035 and this would allow generation to be about 95 per cent renewable by 2035, moving to 100 per cent by 2050, to meet government targets.

But the demand outlook has fallen since a similar report two years ago. It forecasts lower electricity demand growth of 70 per cent to 2050, compared with 100 per cent in the 2018 report, due to widespread uptake of energy efficiency measures.