Brian Rudman: Those Pavlov's dog lobbyists need to lighten up

Wouldn't you know, the lights were hardly out on Monday before the various lobbyists were up on their hind legs like Pavlov's dogs blaming the poor old Resource Management Act.

Meanwhile, Auckland Mayor Dick Hubbard and Heart of the City spokesman Alex Swney were wailing about our joining the Third World.

If I can be excused a cheap pun, they should all lighten up.

So the power went off for a while, but did anyone die? Did we have a crime wave? No and no.

And as for the $50 million to $100 million of lost business that Alasdair Thompson of the Employers and Manufacturers Association wittered on about, that sounded like a throwback to the muddled economics of his old Social Credit past.

Surely most of the business wasn't lost, just deferred for a few hours.

Firstly, the power cut had nothing to do with the RMA. Sure, people have been warning for years of the dangers of funnelling all of Auckland's electricity through the 50-year-old Otahuhu substation bottleneck.

But Transpower has not submitted any scheme to spread that load. So there's been nothing to object to yet - except the lack of any plans for diversification. So let's leave the RMA out of it.

Secondly, why do our leaders delight in linking Auckland with the Third World?

How much better if Mayor Hubbard had surrounded himself in a halo of candles and proudly announced we were now up there with the big shots such as New York and San Francisco, both of which have experienced major electricity outages in recent times.

In August 2003 dozens of cities across the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, New York among them, lost power for many hours. In July 1999 New York City had a 19-hour blackout. The previous December a construction crew's mistake blacked out a 127sq km area of San Francisco for seven hours, affecting nearly a million people. I could keep going. The reality is, these technical failures happen, even in the richest of countries.

What will separate us out as either First or Third World is how we react to Monday's wake-up call.

I heard someone from electricity grid operator Transpower arguing that its controversial Big Pylon plan, currently facing major opposition in the Waikato and South Auckland, would solve the Otahuhu problem.

But even if the option of running a line via the Pakuranga substation were adopted, it would fail to solve the inherent risk of having all Auckland's power passing through the Otahuhu substation.

Even the line through Hillsborough to Henderson, which kept the lights burning in the North Shore and North Auckland on Monday, passes through Otahuhu. A well-aimed jumbo jet could have done an even better job than the loose earth wire did and left a third of New Zealand's population all but powerless for days or weeks.

But let's not get hung up on the Otahuhu substation. What happens if the volcanoes of the central plateau play up? A decent explosion could not only knock out the national grid carting power up from the South Island, but also fill the Waikato dams with ash, ending that power source as well. Even a major Wellington earthquake could jeopardise our South Island supplies.

All of which is by way of saying, we've lucked out so far by relying on one southern wire into Auckland, but why wait until that luck runs out before building ourselves complementary and alternative sources of supply. Already signalled is Genesis Energy's new 240MW gas-power station alongside the Kaipara Harbour. It could be generating by 2008-09, joining the small 10MW geothermal plant at Ngawha as the only sources of electricity north of Otahuhu B.

Further north is the mothballed Marsden Pt power station, monument to the pre-RMA days when politicians could get away with such follies.

It was built nearly 30 years ago and never used, because the politicians who built it suddenly realised we couldn't afford the oil to fire it.

Mighty River now wants to turn it into a 320MW coal-fired plant. Other options include Contact Energy's planned gas-fired station next to its existing Otahuhu plant and the Awhitu windfarm.

The First World response to Monday's gentle wake-up call would be to take advantage of it gratefully by concentrating on diversification. In an RMA sort of way.