Unusual life on planet Strange

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Dr Patrick Strange is not the most boring man in the country, but he would no doubt be rather thrilled if you were to think of him that way.

He would quite like it too if he could go for a cup of coffee without being recognised.

The stuff that gets Strange recognised is not quite celebrity. He gets recognised because he is the man who fronts up to tell us that we need to turn the heaters off and freeze to death this winter. He is the man who told us we should all go to Eden Park to save power.

Actually, he told us only one of these things, but a fair percentage of a country being asked to cut its power use by 10 per cent has no difficulty believing both came out of the mouth of Strange.

"What planet is Patrick Strange from?" asked a letter writer to this paper.

The question was in response to the Winter Power Taskforce director's suggestion that going along to watch the Blues stomp all over the Hurricanes three Saturdays ago would help Aucklanders save power.

It seemed simple enough: if 45,000 people went to the match, that meant 45,000 were not at home boiling the jug, watching the television, turning the lights on. But it sounded a bit peculiar.

Strange must get people contacting him all the time with mad ideas for saving power. But he is not one to ever dismiss an idea.

Some are really quite mad, aren't they?

He would not put it quite like that. Oh, he's just being diplomatic.

"I wouldn't say that. They're unusual."

You might say he's a bit unusual himself. "Oh," he agrees cheerfully, "I get a lot of that."

So what planet is Patrick Strange on? Good question. He is the guy who is perfectly happy to front up on the power crisis, but is not interested in talking about himself.

He is going to try very hard to keep it impersonal, but is too pleasant a host to quite pull it off.

So here he is at home, making a cup of tea, giving a guided off-the-record tour of the house. And here I am not noting that his current reading pile includes Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad and Ian McEwan's Atonement. And that we are sitting around a table made from old power poles - his farewell present from Vector, previously Mercury, where he was CEO from 1998 until 2002. He fronted for Mercury during the crisis of 1998.

I have promised not to ask him what he was like as a child.

But I'd hazard he was the sort of child who liked to take things apart, investigate the inner workings, then put everything back together again.

The bit he'd have liked best would have been telling you, in simple language, how a complex mechanism worked.

And that, in very simple language, is what the public part of Strange's job is.

"Whenever you go into any industry, everyone always says 'it's complex, you can't simplify it'. I think we all do it with our patches: the electricity industry is expert at it.

"The reality is you've always got to condense it down to a few important things. That's the challenge."

Strange is the appointee of an industry body called the Grid Security Committee. He doesn't work for the power companies, he doesn't work for the Government.

He says he has always been a sort of outsider. "I'm known for being reasonably independent in my views. I think I'm known for calling a spade a spade in the industry - in a nice way."

Now he is a sort of project manager.

He was out sailing when he got a call in March asking him to manage the nation's power savings. It is an odd sort of job because everyone, including Strange, would agree the job should not exist. It will, hopefully, never exist again.

"I never want to do this again in New Zealand because New Zealand should never really get in this situation."

But he is resolutely staying out of the blame game.

Strange has said since the beginning of the campaign that he will not "be engaging in any wider debates about what happened last year, or what should be done next year".

The other odd thing about this job is that you can't be seen to be having too much fun doing it. It is a serious job and Strange obviously takes it very seriously.

He asks me not to use the word "fun". Sorry, but he does appear to be having a very good time. Perhaps it's the yoga, of which he is terribly fond (although he didn't tell me this). He has been known to fit interviews around his yoga.

He is certainly very relaxed and laughs long and loudly enough to drown out the welcome sound of rain on a tin roof. He likes a good challenge.

Strange settles for "invigorating" to describe the work.

But it is, too, the sort of unenviable position that everyone thinks they could do better. Still, and despite those letters to the editor, Strange finds the public "unfailingly courteous".

There are critics who say that the taskforce's approach is too softly, softly, that "you've got to shock people and you've got to threaten them with cold water". But, he says, "people won't respond to that sort of approach".

Despite my accusing him of being a doom and gloom merchant - we save 7.4 per cent and Strange warns that winter is just around the corner - he insists he is actually "pretty hopeful".

He will say that he would be "extremely disappointed if for one reason or another ... we went to any element of forced intervention like nationwide hot- water cuts".

This is not just for the obvious reason, that the campaign might well be judged to have failed, but because he has "just philosophically a problem with that. It would be an expression that we haven't worked together as a community to avoid it by making our own choice."

Which is pretty nifty really: every minute you spend singing in the shower could be consigning somebody's grandmother to a winter of cold flannel washes.

You will be glad to hear that inside Strange's Auckland villa (he works from home) it is as gloomy as it is at your place.

I can report that, except for a wayward security light that flicks on outside the front door - he splutters that it is very energy efficient - the Winter Power Taskforce head is not wasting a watt.

The microwave is switched off at the wall, the washing is draped over the clothes horse. He hasn't watched television in 10 years.

Strange will not be turning on the underfloor heating this winter and the oven is never used.

But he says, "we're real misers anyway".

You certainly could not accuse Strange of splashing out on expensive suits.

His mission, other than "making sure the lights don't go out", is, I am told (but not by Strange), to get through the crisis without donning a suit.

"I don't think better in a tie."

He is 51. He may or may not go back to being a CEO sometime.

"I don't need to be a CEO just to be a CEO," he says. "You've got be doing something that you really enjoy and personally challenges you.

"And that opportunity may come up as a landscape gardener or a farmer or a CEO."

This job will end when winter does. He is happy about that - he's got things he wants to do: sailing and reading.

See how dull he would like you to think he is.