The power and the passion
If readers were watching Parliament TV at about 2.30pm on Thursday, and we can’t blame them if they had better things to do, they would have heard an amusing exchange between two National Cabinet ministers. It came after some questioning of Energy Minister Simeon Brown by his predecessor in the job, Labour’s Megan Woods. Deputy Prime Minister Nicola Willis set up the gag for Brown in a supplementary question.
“Can the minister advise what type of fuel is better for heating people’s homes?” Willis asked. “Natural gas, coal or ghost business cases?”
Brown replied: “Ghost business cases won’t keep the lights on or keep the heaters on.”
This was on the eve of possible power outages. New Zealanders shivered in anticipation on Friday morning, as temperatures went as low as -6.3C in Christchurch and Transpower warned users had to conserve power or cuts would follow.
In the end, the power stayed on and Transpower advised there would be no need to conserve electricity over the weekend.
On one hand, this is almost a non-story. Warnings were delivered about power supply. Individual customers and major users presumably heard the warnings and did what they were told. The system worked as it should.
But the banter between Brown and Willis, and the blame game between the current government and Labour, opens up a different narrative that raises some very familiar questions. These are questions about our tendency towards short-term thinking and our approach to infrastructure, as well as even larger questions about our seriousness when it comes to climate change.
The short-term vs long-term question was illustrated perfectly by the Government in December when Willis canned an expensive inter-island ferry project in the hope of finding a cheaper, temporary alternative.
Similar thinking was behind the axing of a “ghost business case” known as Lake Onslow.
The $16 billion power scheme would have acted like a giant battery to guarantee consistent power supply when the hydro lakes are low. The Onslow scheme was the brainchild of Earl Bardsley, a research associate in the School of Science at the University of Waikato. He argued that Onslow would have helped store power and stabilised prices for 100 years. As the wind and sun “are going to be intermittent”, Onslow would provide buffering. Without a scheme like Onslow, we need to keep burning coal and gas in dry years.
But it is easy to see how Onslow looked like a big, expensive, niceto-have project for a Government intently focused on cost-cutting. It was a sitting duck. And of course it was years away. It would not have helped us in May 2024.
When Brown announced in December that Onslow was being dumped, he called it a “hugely wasteful project” that was “pouring money down the drain at a time when we need to be reining in spending and focusing on rebuilding the economy and improving the lives of New Zealanders”.
There was also a plausible argument that the scale of Lake Onslow would have had “a chilling effect”, no pun intended, on other renewable energy projects entering the market.
All governments blame the previous one for problems they inherit or the mess they are in, and this one is no exception. Brown sounded like he was coming close to even blaming Labour for it not being windy enough to turn turbines this week.
He was more overt when blaming this week’s potential power crisis on Labour’s oil and gas ban, which led to “an increasingly insecure electricity market”. Again, this is contentious.
Gas production levels were declining long before the Labour government banned oil and gas exploration in 2018. It is highly unlikely that any new gas fields discovered since 2018 would be in use now.
But the lifting of the ban is on the coalition’s most recent to-do list. Meeting our Paris Agreement targets may give us “warm fuzzies”, according to Brown, but it won’t keep the lights on.
New Zealanders who were huddled over their heaters on Friday morning are bored with blame games and politicking, even delivered with humour as it was by Willis and Brown. They want a reliable and consistent power supply and at least some of them want to know we are doing the right thing as a country, which is moving on from oil and gas towards renewables, while there is still time. That means more than “warm fuzzies”.
There was also a plausible argument that the scale of Lake Onslow would have had “a chilling effect”, no pun intended, on other renewable energy projects entering the market.