Consumers lose in big power firms’ rort

Hazards to all GHG deductions Finding NZ

The big electricity generator/ retailers are winning the fight against lower electricity prices for New Zealanders.

My view is that the wholesale electricity price has been artificially raised in order to eliminate those new retailers which are offering cheaper electricity – companies like Flick, Payless etc.

The big players got their first victim this week as Payless left the electricity retailing business after suffering losses caused by super-high wholesale electricity prices.

The companies which generate and retail electricity are the big winners in this rort. They’re profiting enormously at the wholesale end and that more than compensates for the losses in their retail sales. The losers are consumers and the smaller electricity companies. They’ll almost certainly be driven out of business by this market manipulation.

A recent study claimed that the generating companies had made an excess profit of $5.4 billion over the past six years. Kiwis need to be protected from this price gouging, it’s resulting in energy poverty for many families.

When companies like Flick are gone, the retail price of electricity will almost certainly climb higher. Only competition will keep prices down. The Commerce Commission appears to be asleep as gouging in electricity prices continues apace. Neil Harrap, Wellington The fountain of knowledge and expertise that is Wellington City Council’s cycleway planning unit appears to have struck again.

The changes in progress along the first section of Oriental Parade look pretty good in the main, but lead to an impossibly tight pedestrian crossing and traffic island complex at Freyberg Pool.

This forces cyclists to merge with cars and buses and pass through a very tight single lane in each direction. Coming from the airport side, this is rendered totally unworkable by a bus stop immediately after the crossing.

The bus can’t turn tight enough to get into the layby, and the back of it hangs out into the traffic and blocks the narrow run through that section whenever it stops.

Already I’ve seen cars trying to slither between the back of the bus and the centre island, going for the same gap as commuting cyclists.

This is poor design and, ironically, represents a greater hazard to cyclists than the original layout. Embarrassment and further risk could be avoided by rectifying this before the work is ‘‘officially’’ finished. Andrew Robertson, Hataitai When apportioning responsibility for contributing to climate change, comparisons between The Dominion Post is subject to the NZ Media Council. Complaints must be directed to editor@dompost

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the per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by different countries can be seriously misleading.

If goods produced in each country stayed in that country, such comparisons might be valid, but they usually don’t. China’s industrial energy expenditure is largely used in the manufacture of goods for export, of which New Zealand is a consumer.

Realistically therefore, the CO2 China emits in manufacturing the goods we import from China should be included in the accounting of New Zealand’s emissions, and deducted from those of China.

But what is emission sauce for the goose is emission sauce for the gander; to be consistent, it could equally be argued that greenhouse gases emitted in New Zealand’s production of meat and dairy produce that is eaten in other countries should be deducted from our emissions and added to the emissions of those other countries.

All of which suggests it’s more complex than we have been told.

Martin Hanson, Nelson The terms ‘‘discovery’’ and ‘‘rediscovery’’ in relation to countries are, as some recent correspondents have pointed out, subjective, depending on the point of view of the speaker.

It is for that reason I prefer the absolute way of describing Abel Tasman’s involvement as being the ‘‘first known European to have sighted and documented New Zealand Aotearoa’’.

The first sentence in the Admiralty’s instructions to James Cook made a distinction between ‘‘countries hitherto unknown’’ and ‘‘. . . distant parts which though formerly discover’d have yet been imperfectly explored . . .’’

The Admiralty and Cook were well aware of Tasman in these parts. The instructions were, if Cook did not find the Unknown Southern Continent as far south as 40°Sth, he was to proceed in a westerly direction till ‘‘. . . [he] fall in with the eastern side of the land discoverer’d by Tasman and now called New Zeland [sic]’’.

Dirk Rinckes, Waikanae