Retorts

Energy Challenge

It was encouraging to see Electricorp announce the construction of an experimental wind power system in Wellington. Increasingly, these options must be seen as far preferable to the rather bizarre idea they floated earlier to fuel a power station here using Australian coal. Many saw that as a sneaky way of ushering in the nuclear option instead.

In the US, the nuclear option is pricing itself out of the business. One twin complex looked at by MP Clive Matthewson, on a recent visit there, had been budgeted to cost US$2 billion (just under NZ$4 billion) and produce 2300 megawatts. That's just over five times the output of the Clyde dam, which will eventually cost about $2 billion.

This twin complex, when only three-quarters complete, had actually cost US$11.4 billion before it was abandoned. That makes the cost overruns at Clyde seem rather mild. Nearly a million dollars a megawatt, or over five times the cost per megawatt from Clyde at its final "overrun" cost.

Ominously, one wonders how the $20 billion or more projected cost for New Zealand's future power stations will turn out to be in real terms. Certainly the US experience has led power utilities there to concentrate on the conservation of electricity usage as an alternative to building new generating plant, as a way of maximising profits.

In other words, they made greater profits from selling less power to conservation-minded users than losing it all on huge new power plants that would go bust on cost overruns.

Stiff rate increases are imposed when users exceed reasonable limits of usage. The same has been proposed for New Zealand, but is unlikely to succeed if the present breakup of the electricity marketing utilities, with their accent on supply, is carried out.

The scenario of competing utilities will lead to price cutting, therefore more wasteful usage, and the marketing of electricity to "use more" would continue. The result would be that the many overseas-owned companies in New Zealand using cheaper electricity would be exporting more by way of profits from the country. That exodus would have to be met by higher charges for domestic users.

However, there has been the recent development of "smart meters" for even domestic users. These meters tell you how much power you are presently using, at what rate and how much it is progressively costing you in total. With "one eye on the clock", customers use and waste less, and savings up to 50% can be achieved.

With creative cost analysis dragging the old squandering consumption mentality of unbridled competition into the 21st century, and with the development of new technology such as smart meters and wind power, harnessing of the sun's power, biomass and more efficient insulation, there would be no need for destructive and possibly dangerous dams such as that proposed for Tuapeka, Luggate, Lower Waitaki or anywhere else.

The issue is not an argument between different kinds of power generation to fulfil projections of electricity usage. It is a matter -- or rather, a challenge -- to use new technology and methods to obviate the need for the obvious environmental destruction the "old ways" of thinking would cause.

Trevor Reeves, Dunedin