KEY POINTS:
Can you believe it? That in the year 2008 of the 21st century this country again faces a looming crisis in electricity supply.
That in spite of a decade or more of steady economic growth, accompanied by power company profits as obscene as the annual Budget surpluses, the electricity generating equipment and transmission infrastructure are in such a state of disrepair that they cannot be relied on.
That there is, according to a report in this newspaper on Tuesday, a distinct possibility that householders may face power cuts in the depths of the coming winter.
That something called the "Winter Power Group", having decided that there could be a power crisis, met in Wellington yesterday to discuss, among other things, "contingency planning".
That part of the Cook Strait cable, on which the North Island depends for power from the South, has been allowed to deteriorate to such an extent that its insurers threatened to withdraw coverage and it was taken out of service in September last year. It is still shut down.
That power supply is already tight because two of Contact Energy's New Plymouth power stations are out of action - one permanently.
Add to that the shortage of water in South Island lakes and hot, humid weather causing the Huntly power station to keep its output down for fear of overheating the Waikato River and what we have is a picture of an electricity industry in total disarray.
It would be nice to be able to point the finger at this eight-year-old Labour-led Government and blame it for this almost incomprehensible debacle.
But that wouldn't be entirely fair, for the present state of the electricity industry probably dates back to the eight-year National-led administration of Jim Bolger and Jenny Shipley and particularly to a long-forgotten rooster named Max Bradford.
Nevertheless, there is a Minister of Energy who needs to take responsibility for this situation and there is a Government-appointed Electricity Commission, set up in 2003, to ensure that the situation I've just outlined never happened.
It has as its principal objective under the Electricity Act "to ensure that electricity is produced and delivered to all classes of consumers in an efficient, fair, reliable and environmentally sustainable manner".
It would seem that in five years it has failed miserably to carry out its mandate, since, once again, we are faced with a winter, not of discontent - although there will be plenty of that - but of disconnection.
Now, I don't even pretend to understand how our power generation and supply works; all I know is that my monthly power and gas bill is exorbitant for a home with only two people and no dishwasher, who each shower once a day and who use mainly cold washes in the washing machine. We have one gas appliance which costs us about $25 a month in "daily fixed charges" whether we use it or not; the same charge for electricity works out at $10 a month.
The sorry state of our generation and transmission capacity surely shows that the "reforms" to our electricity industry, by both National and Labour, over the past dozen years or so have, if anything, made our supply less rather than more reliable.
And I wonder about the extent to which profit motives of privatised electricity industry companies have contributed to this state of affairs.
It would seem obvious that maintenance of generation and transmission equipment has been neglected in the interests of returns to shareholders and that a similar attitude has been taken to building up reserves to finance new generation.
Then there are the constraints placed on the industry by the growing obsession on the part of some New Zealanders with perceived environmental threats which, for instance, put paid to a well-designed Waitaki River scheme that would have increased hydro-generation significantly.
The great irony, of course, is that the environmentalists, concerned with our empty "clean, green" and "100 per cent pure" boasts, would throw up their hands in horror if anyone were to suggest that New Zealand adopt the cleanest, safest and cheapest generation available in the world today - nuclear power plants.
But we have made such a thing of our nuclear-free (or rather, anti-nuclear) stance for so long now that it seems to have become part of our national psyche.
Just how long the nuclear Luddites will hold sway remains to be seen, but in the meantime it's time someone woke up to the fact that, without an adequate and reliable supply of electricity, real progress in this country is doomed.
