Philippa Stevenson: Transpower waving red flag to a bull

It was a snap. The same cards were laid on the table at an Auckland energy conference as at a pylon protest in Hamilton.

In Auckland on Tuesday, Todd Energy managing director Richard Tweedie was blaming insufficient competition in the electricity sector for its "significant market dysfunction".

"It's a jack-up," he told an energy conference, with the Government protecting and favouring its own enterprises - Meridian, Genesis, Mighty River Power and Transpower.

At about the same time in Hamilton at a rally to protest Transpower's 200km, 400kV transmission line up the central North Island, radiation scientist Ray Wilkinson was saying much the same thing.

Like Mr Tweedie, he told the hundred or so protesters (until recently, mild-mannered rural types more familiar with post holes than placards) there was only one reason the Government had underwritten Genesis' new gas-fired power station at Huntly - Genesis was a state-owned enterprise.

Contact's new plant at Otahuhu - despite being sited in the place of greatest power need - would not enjoy the Government guarantee because it was a private company.

The Government, he suggested, was more interested in profiting from electricity than seeing it profitably and fairly distributed to its citizens.

And while Mr Tweedie told the conference power companies were burning cheap Maui gas but blaming high electricity prices on more expensive gas, Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons was telling the rally that getting more Aucklanders to use gas should be part of sensible energy planning.

Only 26 per cent of Aucklanders use the gas that runs right past their doors. Yet for heating and cooking it was around twice as efficient as burning it in power stations. Such domestic gas use would also greatly reduce the early-evening electricity peak so troubling power companies, she said.

Fresh from their rally and newly worried by a wealth of information on possible harmful health effects from the transmission lines' electromagnetic field (EMF), the people threatened with pylons could be excused if their blood again boiled after reading Mr Tweedie's remarks in yesterday's Herald.

Probably few of us have understood the labyrinthine electricity sector since it went from single, all-things-to-all-people regional power companies to today's confusing web of generators, transmitters, retailers and bill senders.

But the folks from Whakamaru to Otahuhu being asked to sacrifice their property values, scenery, possibly health and, in some cases, land and homes are learning fast. Unjustifiably so.

Why has it suddenly become the responsibility of a few embattled communities to cost and quantify alternative energy strategies for the entire country?

Why are individuals jamming the internet to read up on electromagnetic fields and the likelihood of children getting leukaemia from them?

Why are the same people boning up on the differences between direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC) and wondering why it's okay to sling a lower impact DC line up the South Island but not past their place?

Why are they spending their hard-earned money forming incorporated societies to propose that power stations be sited where they are needed rather than hundreds of kilometres away?

Why are they wondering why some countries with more stringent exposure standards to EMF than ours already require development-free corridors under such lines but ours does not?

The questions mount and the answers - where there are some - are seldom believed, let alone found to be comforting.

Clearly, Transpower's attempts at consultation have done little more than wave a red rag at an already enraged bull.

It can't be blamed for trying to both put in the transmission line and consult people - it's what it is required to do.

But none of us would want the transmission lines in our backyard. Nor should we expect others to have them on the basis of the arguments put forward so far.

Transpower has played one card and more people are rightly clamouring to see the whole deck.