John Blakeley: Sun holds key to ending power problem

COMMENT

Bryan Leyland's Dialogue article advocated solving New Zealand's long-term electricity supply problem by building a $2 billion transmission link from the lower South Island to north of Auckland.

This, he said, would enable the building of a large coal-fired power station in Southland and the completion of the hydro-power development of the Waitaki and Clutha rivers to deliver more power to Auckland to meet the city's increasing power needs.

Mr Leyland said the impediments to his proposal were the Resource Management Act and New Zealand's Kyoto Protocol commitment. They would slow the programme to implement such projects.

These, however, are existing constraints within New Zealand's policies which everybody will have to live with, unless a radical rethink of our environmental and climate-change policies enables such projects to be fast-tracked.

Another major impediment to his proposal is the structure of the wholesale electricity market.

This encourages money to be invested in new generation projects rather than in new transmission projects, to the extent that there are already significant constraints in our transmission system and it is very difficult to decide who should pay for removing them.

Also, markets in general are notoriously bad at defining long-term solutions because they tend to be focused in the near future.

A large investment in the long-distance transmission of electricity would be contrary to future electricity scenarios suggesting that we will gradually move towards more distributed generation networks, in which many small generation projects will be developed close to the point of electricity use.

My vision would involve many wind-power projects and some small hydro stations and geothermal power projects embedded within local electricity networks.

This would reduce the amount of bulk electricity that has to be supplied into such networks from further afield.

Central to this concept of distributed generation is the expected rapid technological advance of solar power. This is still a long way from being economically viable for electricity supply, except in remote locations. But we can already see solar panels on service-station forecourts and in some other locations.

This demonstrates what the technology will be able to achieve once the price comes down, which it should do dramatically within the next 30 years.

The billions of dollars that would go into an electricity superhighway project and associated large generation projects in the lower South island would be much better invested in many renewable energy projects spread around the country, plus a much more determined effort to promote energy conservation measures and to finance energy efficiency projects to reduce demand.

Hopefully, this will get us through the next 30 to 50 years. At that stage, solar power will be able to generate electricity at a price low enough to ensure that most people and most commerce and industry have enough solar panels on their roofs to render the long-distance transmission of electricity unnecessary.

* John Blakeley, convener of the Sustainable Energy Forum, is a research fellow at Unitec.