As I have noted previously, the transport chapter of the Auckland Plan is a mixed bag. On the positive side it has some great goals – which talk about reducing car dependency, reducing the environmental impact of transport, boosting public transport patronage and modeshare, increasing the extent of the rapid transit network (RTN) and quality transit network (QTN) and so forth. It’s all great stuff:
On the not so positive side, the Plan also proposes the construction of a large number of motorway projects that will completely undermine the strategic direction council is wishing to take, while also eating up an enormous amount of money:
| Project | Cost |
| Puhoi-Wellsford | $1.4 billion |
| Neilson Street east-west link | $1.25 billion |
| State Highway pinch-points | $1.2 billion |
| Airport road access improvements | $730 million |
| Additional Waitemata Crossing | $5.3 billion (up to) |
| Port-Grafton Gully connection | $1 billion |
| Total | $10.88 billion |
Given the weird discrepancy between the transport goals of the Auckland Plan and its list of projects (something I pointed out in my submission) a closer look at the thinking that went on behind the scenes in formulating the transport section of the Auckland Plan. A technical document entitled “Transport Framework for the Auckland Plan” provides some answers, though certainly not all of them.
The process which has been undertaken to inform the transport parts of the Auckland Plan are outlined in the introduction of the technical paper:
This seems a reasonably sensible approach. In term of land-use scenarios the Draft Auckland Plan is not seen as too disimilar to previous work done over many many years – although with perhaps a bit more urban expansion than previous planning documents had anticipated. Four different scenarios were looked at:
The scenarios are examined in more detail in other technical documents, but the key here is to work out what the preferred scenario of the Auckland Plan is – and what were assumed as the necessary projects to support that particular scenario. Looking through the scenario evaluation document in more detail it seems the Draft Auckland Plan resembles “Scenario B” most closely, while the table below compares the projects considered necessary to support each of the four scenarios: 
While some of the decisions about which scenarios would require which transport projects are fairly logical, in other cases I somewhat struggle to understand the logic. For example I’m not particularly sure why Scenario B requires a North Shore Rail line but other scenarios don’t; or why scenarios B and C require third railway lines on the main trunk line, but the others don’t (particularly unsure why scenario A doesn’t require that). It also seems odd why Scenario C would require the Puhoi-Wellsford Road.
In any case, obviously the different scenarios requiring different transport projects leads to them having a different cost:
Somewhat unsurprisingly, because Scenario B involves pretty much all the projects (for some yet to be justified reason), it comes out as the most expensive. Scenario A, which focuses on public transport (but without North Shore Rail), comes out cheapest – once again rather unsurprisingly.
The next section of the technical document talks about all the transport principles of the Auckland Plan – which as I have said before, are generally very good:
- Use a one system approach to the planning, management and development of our transport system (including state highways; arterial and local roads; freight; rail, bus and ferry services; walking and cycling; ports and airports).
- Achieve the appropriate balance between movement and place, considering capacity (accommodating movement of every kind safely) and character (role of road/street in the urban setting and types of buildings/landscape present or planned).
- Ensure that long term land use and activities drive long term transport functionality and that transport investment aligns with growth as envisaged in this Plan.
- Ensure that existing and proposed transport investment is used optimally.
- Take advantage of all opportunities for transport to assist in place shaping.
- In place shaping and corridor management plans, recognise and accommodate different circumstances, by area, time and the transport need.
- Recognise existing community investment and the need to enable connectivity between and within communities.
- Align community expectations in urban areas with urban levels of service, particularly with realistic expectations around levels of congestion.
- Align community expectations in rural areas with rural levels of service, particularly acknowledging limited opportunities for alternatives to motor vehicle travel.
- Ensure that the transport system is safe and facilitates the efficient movement of people and goods.
- Ensure that transport is sustainable in the long term and minimises negative impacts on the built and natural environment.
The increased focus on ensuring that transport decisions are taken with the impact of those decisions on the built and natural environment (hinted at in principles 2, 3, 5 and 11) is particularly welcome, as is the focus on ensuring good value for money (principle 4). What seems to unfortunately be missing from the document though is some sort of assessment of each proposed project against these eleven principles. This mis-match comes through in the Draft Plan quite obviously too, being the reason why there seems to be such a discrepancy between what the Plan wants to achieve from transport at a high level and the actual projects being proposed.
It seems most likely the mismatch between the principles/goals of the Auckland Plan and the projects proposed exists because of politics. Everyone loves proposing big transport projects, particularly ones in their part of Auckland, rather than necessarily looking strategically at the region overall and focusing on what we really need – as well as what we might really want to prioritise in order to push our transport/land-use outcome in a particular way. The process of identifying which projects are required for which land-use outcome seems to have been rather opaque, while it would also be nice to see each project assessed against the transport principles of the plan as many of the more expensive roading projects would, I suspect, not stack up against helping to achieve the general goals of the plan.
It will be interesting to see how the final Plan differs from what’s in the draft.
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Another clear analysis, admin, thank-you. But the allocation of projects to scenarios looks well bonkers…..?
Very good summary of the resource supply issues the world faces now, and are completely relevant to what choices we make with transport investment below by a US physicist on his Do The Math site:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/peak-oil-perspective/
Strongly recommend.
I just took a look at that site Patrick linked and found it an interesting read.
Ironically the graph in the Plenty of Hydro-carbon subsection of all available is probably the way we as a civilisation will go in consuming hydro-carbons for the transport fleet. This is unless hydrogen fuel cells (from water) become economical and mainstream for the transportation fleet in the next 20 years.
As for the Auckland Plan’s Transport Decisions post, the Scenario thingy with which projects would be “needed” for each scenario seems paradoxial or rather near done in-ept-ly (unless there is something I have missed in the decision making process)
Ah well, got my hearing at the Auckland Future Vision Committee at the end of November – looking foward to what will be my first ever hearing – and especially on such a critical issue as The Auckland Plan 😀
I am getting so confused about the cost of Puhoi to Wellsford! How can they say that it will cost $1.4billion when NZTA themselves don’t even know how they will get from Warkworth to Wellsford. I have seen the cost of this road low-balled (even as low as $1.2billion) – but usually by local representatives who would fight tooth and nail to get the road built. I have seen other costs ranging from $1.6bn to $2.0bn – has anyone seen a definitive statement from NZTA as to what Puhoi to Warkworth will cost and then what will Warkworth to Wellsford cost?
Pukekohoe? PUKEKOHOE?
Who writes these things?
How about they consider the global economic picture and the future resource constraints (mainly the future price of oil) in considering what to do. If you want them look regional why not global.
I think it is stupid to set targets for 2040. How have we measured up to targets set in 1980? Does anyone even know what they were, let alone care? If they set targets for 2015 then we’d be able to measure achievement, whereas policy makers realise that they’ll never be held accountable for the distant future.
Totally agree with you Obi. Has SH20 Roskill extension achieved it’s goals, for instance? What about SH20/SH1 interchange? What about any transport project, for that matter? Billions of dollars of expenditure, and no one will be able to tell you if a BCR has been achieved, because they aren’t actually measurable.
Yes I also agree with you Obi, although the Auckland Plan is required by legislation to take a 20-30 year outlook. I would be much more interested in knowing what the patronage target is for 2015, what the modeshare change target is for 2015 and so forth.
Cam, NZTA do conduct post-completion BCR audits, they just never make them public. Time for a bit of OIA work I think.
Bridge to Karaka???
As the linked article described, oil is being depleted, the price is rising and will continue to rise. Other fossil fuels are replacing oil or being converted to liquids as replacements but these resources will also be depleted.
NZ consumes about 150,000bbl/day of oil, most of this is burnt as fuel. There’s about 1.7MWh of energy per bbl, so thats about 10GW we’d have to find a replacement for. This is a little more than the installed capacity of all our electricity generation. How would we go about doubling the amount of electricity we generate?
Hydrogen is not an energy source, only a possible means of storage or an intermediate step between source and consumption.
It would be an awlful lot of corn or biomass, solar panels, wind or tidal generators. Where would all this be grown or built?
On this scale there is coal (and uranium) which won’t last forever, 100 years?
There is no cheap solution or practical alternative energy source on the horizon (think “Mr Fusion”). Efficiency and reducing consumption is the only long term path.
The life of the city and infrastructure we’re building now is such that it needs to be based on this premise. This means high density and compactness. Think Singapore.
Antony there are lots of answers to your questions, not least of which is that electric motors works at 85% efficiency against petrol’s 25%-ish. But more importantly the future is local and micro. Here is a description of how things can change, this from Sydney. And Remember this is in an environment with a lack of support from gov. and big biz that borders on hostility:
“To the gob-smacked amazement of Big Power in this country the individual small business and homeowner has installed 300 MW of solar PV in the past couple of years, neatly pulling the carpet out from under the case for building another big coal-fired power station. It’s wonderful to watch the consternation on the faces of the boys in the utility club as they realise – so late – that PV and wind are REAL, and threaten their comfortable put-up-the-prices-every-year model.
There is some busy shifting of industry deckchairs going on as the case for spending $48 billion (yes, billion) on upgrading Australia’s electricity distribution networks is starting to look shaky. The case was always founded on excessive safety factors and a slavish insistence on planning for every airconditioner in the country to be turned on at once. Distributed generation and lots of local PV really wreck the case for so much network investment because surprise, surprise, PV works best when the sun is shining, which is when the airconditioning load is highest – a technology marriage made in heaven for hot sunny countries.
Conservative industries like electricity distribution have exactly the cultures that are crap at adjusting to new circumstances. PV is a game changer when the industry only thinks in terms of giant power plants. It’s amazing how big some of the rooftop installations are around here. Last night I noticed the Anglican old people’s home over the road from the petrol station I was visiting. The Anglican diocese must be cashed-up – they have something like 40 panels covering every square meter of north-facing roof. Huge! The build-out of PV around Sydney in the last 2 years has been astonishing. Easy to see why the power companies are worried, and are fighting back by lobbying to have installation incentives withdrawn.”
Imagine if the government was actually supporting this change? It would help if we still own the power companies of course…..
Also it’s not a question of suddenly moving everything to electrons, not even possible, but gradually investing away from the dangerous and impoverishing current near total dependance on fossil fuels to electricity where ever possible.
Of which we are so lucky in NZ to have such a good supply here in NZ
It wouldn’t be 300MW considering the largest solar plants in the world around only around the 30-40MW mark and those cover a large area, more likely to be 3KW which would be enough for most homes most of the time.
Thats 300MW of solar added in total over the “past couple of years”, presumably throughout Australia.
Sydney only I think
Matt read a little more carefully, he is not talking about power plants at all but the accumulation of individual and small business micro installations. That’s the very point; enough of those and, boom!, no need for new big plants and hugely upgraded distribution networks.
Very scary for big coal in Aus., who, of course, like the regressive forces here, love to run the ‘there is no alternative’ argument. Smugly.
PV is a potential game-changer. Prices are falling rapidly. PV/wind/tidal plus storage (via large batteries such as vanadium flow batteries) is even more of a game-changer since storage addresses the primary shortcoming of many renewables; the lack of dispatchability.
Bridge to Karaka is the long proposed bridge from the end of the Weymouth penninsula to Kingseat.
The Karaka Bridge which is not hard to imagine will happen in the very distant future, to my own thinking would mean development could move sideways instead of further south and distribute development around Manukau City Centre, which in the distant future when the population permits becomes the southern CBD.
“Use a one system approach”
Do they have any suggestions for how this can be acheived, given we currently have 3 or 4 split approaches, mostly controlled by central government at the moment?
You have greatly overestimated the requirement for additional generation by assuming that electric and IC vehicles have similar overall energy efficiencies.
You have ignored the fact that NZ currently has surplus generating capacity at night.
You have stated that there are no practical alternative energy sources on the horizon when there is a multiplicity of such sources as well as viable electrical storage technologies.
While we might have surplus generating capacity at night, we usually aren’t spilling water from the dams. There is not a surplus of available energy.
Under normal circumstances photovoltaics produce far more expensive energy than fossil fuels. Even with an A$8000 government rebate per house, breakeven is still many years.
Electric cars batteries are also very expensive, and heavy. While they might convert electricty to motion more efficiently than a petrol car converts petrol, the electricity also has generation and transmission losses. If the electricty is generated from coal, the figures work out about the same. Even taking the 25% & 85% figures, it’s still an additional 3GW, and we’d have to replace the entire vehicle fleet, not something that would happen very quickly.
Here is a case study from ZNelson NZ, I sure this guy won’t mind me re-posting his post from The Oil Drum: No subsidies, PV math is already viable for some-
Here in New Zealand there is ZERO subsidy for PV generation (the electricity company will simply credit you with a 1:1 credit on power generated), so the economics have to make sense at an individual level. I modelled this is several ways but one of the most convincing arguements I came up with was this. The cost of our fully installed system (3kW grid tie) was $NZ$22,000. In the first year of use it would (and is) generate $1350 of electricity savings. We had the NZ$ 22000 available sitting in the bank. As in almost every other country interest rates here have been slashed (and have been ultra low for 2 years with absolutely no sign they are going to improve) so the best annual interest available on that sum is 4.5% or NZ$990/annum. After tax that is reduced to approx $740.
As against $1350.
No contest what I should do with the $22000 was there?
Then throw in the fact that annual electricity rises in NZ have been of the order of 7% per annum, so that $1350 in savings doubles in 10 years.
Then throw in the fact that the buying power of the original $22,000 is being now constantly denuded by inflation/currency devaluation (yes we are involved in a rush to the bottom as well).
In 10 years time I would guess the buying power of that $22,000 would probably be halved.
So hell I dont really care if the EROI of my system is 7.5 or 8 or 10.
I just know that it makes a ton of economic sense AND in my own small way I am doing something.Our electricity bills have effectively been abolished and so now our only external cost for the heating/running of our home is the propane gas cyclinders we use. The cost of those comes in at NZ$300 a year, and that has become the TOTAL energy cost of running our home (there was already a pre-existing solar water system fitted to the house when we bought it). Ours is not a small house – 250m square (including workshop garage).
Its your lucky day – Powersmartsolar NZ just sent me their latest deals on panels with prices slashed (sob – cheaper than I bought 12 months ago, ah well) 3kW system now NZ$15,250!!! Go to http://www.powersmartsolar.co.nz (and tell them Andy Hamilton from Nelson sent you, LOL)
While it is true there is no government subsidy the 1:1 ratio indicates that the electricity company is cross-subsidizing the grid tie customer from the money it makes from “normal” customers. A rough estimate of the long-run average wholesale electricity price is $60/MWhr or 6c per Kwh. This is much lower than retail prices (normally over 20c/kWh). Truly unsubsidized generation cannot be “net metering”, as it leaves not margin for the retailer to pay for its cost’s.
I do support micro-generation and distributed generation, however it should be noted that large grid scale plants produce much better returns on investment. Also it should be noted that there are many gird scale power projects consented and ready to go waiting for economic conditions to improve.
So Scott, you oppose feed-in tariffs even at 1:1?
I don’t have a problem with private company choosing to net meter customers as happens in NZ. Whether we should require all companies to do so is a much more difficult question. The key question is: are the benefits of micro-generation worth subsidizing? (by the way a 1:1 feed in tariff (FIT is a massive subsidy). I’m inclined in a New Zealand situation to say no. Why should power normal users pay lots extra for distributed generation when there are wholesale plants offering into the wholesale market at a lower price that are not dispatched.
The marginal fixed cost (if that isn’t that an oxymoron?) as with transport, is to pay for peak capacity.
To my mind home solar systems actually reduce that capacity required in the transmission system. Peak demand is during the day when offices are open and factories are operating. This is when we need the most long haul transmission capacity to get power from the powerstations to the cities.
But solar production matches this peak perfectly, producing power when it’s needed most, such that some of the cities power is generated locally and less is needed from remote generation sites. When the householder is at home at night and drawing down from the grid, they are just using excess capacity that would otherwise be idle.
Another way to think of it, if you were paying the spot price that varies during the day, the highest cost of power is during the day, to reflect the high marginal cost of peak supply. The lowest price would be during the night.
With 1:1 net metering you are supplying expensive peak capacity, and consuming cheap night-time spare capacity.
So you are swapping expensive peak generation for cheap off peak generation, and reducing transmission capacity requirements. Sounds like 1:1 is a bit unfair, the power company should be paying you!
What about greenhouse gas reductions? I assume that outside of drought conditions, if there is a reduction in peak demand/increase in supply, that they would ramp down the diesel stations and keep the cheap hydro generation running? If so there should be carbon credits available – though not too sure how they certify you production is replacing dirty coal/diesel rather than clean hydro
(In the UK you can have solar panels fitted at no cost, you keep the free electricity, the installers costs are partly covered by govt installation grant, the rest they make back from selling the carbon credits for the next 20 years.
In NZ peak electricity demand happens in winter mornings and evenings (domestic heating and cooking times). So not a very good match for solar.
goto http://www.electricityinfo.co.nz/comitFta/ftapage.main to see the live wholesale power prices. Currently power price is approx $70 per MWhr. (or 7c/kWhr). Do you really think it makes economic scene for the power company to buy power at retail price (20c +/kWhr)?
The very few diesel plants we have only run when the price is very high (cos diesel is very expensive). Most hydro plants In NZ can store water and hence run peaker duty.
I like grid tie generation for non financial reasons, but in NZ It is definitely cheaper build gird scale hydro/wind etc. I don’t see any reason to stop people who want to grid tie from doing so, but I don’t see any reason to promote it either. BTW I would love a grid tie PV setup. 🙂
Scott this is exactly what I mean. You are looking at this issue as if the world doesn’t exist; only spread sheets do. There are no more rivers to dam, for both cost and obviously environmental reasons. Wind farms are a good fit with our hydro, and I like the look of them but a lot of people don’t. There’s more we could do with Geothermal, but ideally it would be good to eventually wind back our thermal capacity, so we’ll need to do those anyway. It would great to not have to keep investing in ever more transmission. So if not micro and local then what, and what better way to ease towards that than with a feed-in tariff? Yes the individual is helped by the group, but remember the group built all those assets in the first place for the benefit of the group, and the individual with solar water and/or PV does help with loading at various times including peaks.
So it isn’t just a question of the economics for the power companies, we need to consider the whole of society within the environment [and the laws of thermodynamics]…. unless of course your view is that nutty neo-liberal one where society is deemed not to exists at all?
The point i was trying to prove was that the case study was deceptive in its use of unsubsidized.
Despite what you say NZ still has plenty of untapped grid scale renewable. If you want the cheapest power go with these. If you like the look of solar panels on the roof go with them. Even with the absence of feed in traiffs some retailers still chose to offer 1:1 billing, so I don’t really see where the gains come from introducing a traiff.
What I’m getting at is why should a say 5kW solar plant get more for its power than a 3MW one? (assuming both are embedded)
To make it clear I support micro-generation, but don’t see the need for FIT legislation in the NZ situation.
I understand that you disagree with me.
Friend of mine in the waikato has a windmill and some solar. He has TWO power meters; one for incoming, one for outgoing.
Every month he gets a cheque from the power co. instead of a bill.
Pleasure to open that mail!
Meh, not ever really keen on legislation, and like you say they’re doing it anyway. Point of the real world example was to show that private PV can already stack up *financially* for the individual user- so long as they are not borrowing to do it. This is outside of abstractions such as EROEI, etc… and that if some number of people or organisations take this rational step it has the potential to affect the big sums involved at the collective level.
Is what you are saying that it is a poorer idea for all these individuals to make that investment choice [which is financially positive for them] because they are in effect being cross-subsidised by the group [because they are using the network, effectively, as storage] and because the sum of the small units is less efficient than big scale generation and its sale and distribution?
Thanks for the links Scott, very interesting to learn that the peak sometimes occurs in the evening.
So to reliably reduce peak generation and transmission requirements, you’d need night store heaters too, ideally stored during the night from off peak capacity, but possibly from your own solar generation during the day if you couldn’t get a good contract from the retailer that combined net metering with separate on & off peak metering.
DC, hot water solar, which obviously heats up during the day and stores well into the night does influence the evening peak. Enough people using that it would have an effect.
Even in NZ there are inherent subsidies in a grid-connected PV system that credits net generation at the same rate that it is billed. A substantial portion of the bill is to cover the distribution system. There is an expectation that the grid will supply whenever the PV system is unable to, with close to 100% reliability.
Such knots you economic purists tie yourselves into…. ah the pursuit of perfection? Me?, I’m for the least worst way of doing things, but I insist that every real factor is considered not just those that fit the model.
Again and again I come up against this when discussing things with the dryer end of economic thought: if it’s hard to quantify, we’ll just ignore it.
Consider the real factor that PV generation capacity, kW for kW is not as valuable as, say, hydro generation capacity. I applaud Meridian’s 1 for 1 deal (and will be taking advantage of it next year) but should it be very popular (and why should it not given the financial incentives?) it will not be sustainable. My view is that it will be scaled back in time but that PV prices will continue to fall. Ultimately, however, the issue of storage for PV, wind and tidal must be addressed for them to become dominant (as I believe they will be). A gradual switch to electric vehicles goes some way to adressing it.
“A substantial portion of the bill is to cover the distribution system”
That’s what the daily line charges are for, to pay for the fixed cost of the lines. You still pay line charges with a net metering contract right?
Only the local lines cost I think. Pretty sure the national gird is incorporated in the price of electricity. (I think line losses are incorporated onto the variable cost too).
Australia has an estimated 300 MW of installed photovoltaic (PV) power (September 2010)
This includes many commercial installations up to 1.22MW in size.
Most of Australia has high insolation levels making PV more favorable than other parts of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia
MDF This is what is great about NZ’s huge Hydro *imbalance*. That plus the existing network is the storage. Hydro is incredibly flexible. Mighty River open the gates on the Waikato only 1/2 hour before the evening demand spike in Ak cranks up. When demand is low the water just is kept behind the dams like it’s a big [and very efficient] battery.
So if there is less demand by more people generating their own hot water and electrons, or more wind blowing and a big supply form those sources the water is just kept in the dams for another day. Wind farms plus hydro is the perfect balance for a power company in NZ. Remember wind farms are viable here with no subsidy. It’s a windy place, right.
Your other point about electric cars here wind farms are ideal too- the wind blows at night, a big fleet of electric cars are like a network of distributed storage. Ideally we would have cheap night power rates to encourage this. Having said that I don’t see us being able to afford to replace much of our private fleet with E-cars any time soon. It is urgent that we get the electric public transport network up to full utilisation as soon as possible first.
Hydro is indeed flexible. It’s also low cost to run. While there is water behind the dam it is a source of dispatchable, renewable electricity. To equate the head of water behind the dam as a battery is a poor analogy. It cannot absorb any excess generation from the grid nor can it be charged at will. The daily cycles in the spot market price of electricity illustrate that the dams are not acting as true batteries. A true battery would enable electricity arbitraging; buy low at night, sell high during the morning peak. A true battery would reduce transmission losses (particularly from wind turbines) by running the lines at closer to steady state currents, thus diminishing I²R losses and/or diminishing the capital cost of connecting them.
The combination of wind and hydro, while it has synergy is not ideal. The introduction of, for example, a 200 MW wind turbine plant to an existing network will add an energy source and consequently add kWh capacity (which is desirable) but it adds negligible *guaranteed* peak power generation capacity (kW).
Wind turbines in NZ are economic at the moment but you should be aware that the very best sites will be chosen first and as their penetration increases the ability of a largely fixed hydro capacity to cover for their shortcomings will diminish.
“The existing network is the storage”. This is an illusion. There is no reversible electrical storage in the system. Supply and demand are matched with a very high reliability. In the case of small scale generation you can pretend that the grid is the storage but it is a pretence based on a commitments by other generators (potentially with no financial incentives) and duplicated generation capacity rather than a physical reality. The real prize in respect of PV, wind and tidal is a device that economically provides short term large-scale electrical storage, ie a battery.
Actual batteries are pretty much rubbish; expensive, unreliable and inefficient at scales much bigger than the one on your cell phone. The Holy Grail of the mythical device you describe in your last sentence may never materialise so I think we should plan without any expectation of it’s arrival.
When I say the dam acts as a battery when combined with an intermittent source like wind farms and networked, of course I don’t mean we store power on the network but rather that the network enables substitution of one source with another, and specifically the input from the intermittent one allows us to not generate the hydro, and therefore store that power in the form of the potential in the water unused. The whole system therefore can be seen then to have a battery. The metaphor works. Your complaint that some part of the system is getting value that another doesn’t is irrelevant and a direct result of silly ideologically driven atomising of a network that clearly works better for everyone’s interest if managed as a whole. That it has been artificially spilt up for the purposes of gaming the system is a tragedy but doesn’t concern arguments about how it could run, things change. Still we will put gamblers in charge of strategic assets it seems.
Also about wind farms, I think you are too pessimistic, the limit on how much wind generation we have is political, ie has more to do with acceptable sites politically or socially, not because of a lack of viable possibilities. Furthermore, because of the diversity of the weather we get in NZ at any one time a greater number of farms spread around the country will in fact provide its own built-in provision against intermittency. It’s usually blowing somewhere. Awhitu peninsula, for example, so close to Auckland, would be magnificent with turbines along its western edge. And we have a very long way to go before we run out of Hydro to balance new intermittent generation.
The passage of time will prove you completely, totally, utterly and unequivocally wrong with your battery statements. How, for example, can you simultaneously accept that electric vehicles are viable but that their batteries are “rubbish” since they are bigger than a cellphone battery. Do you, for example, have a better handle on emerging battery technologies than Warren Buffet, Barack Obama or the authors of the following?:
http://www.resourceinvestor.com/News/2011/1/Pages/Vanadium-to-Revolutionize-Green-Energy.aspx
http://green.tmcnet.com/topics/green/articles/150852-obama-acknowledges-ashlawn-energys-flow-battery.htm
http://www.materialstoday.com/view/17881/more-efficient-and-cheaper-vanadium-flow-battery-developed/
NZ has massive reserves of vanadium, although it currently supplies only around 4% of world demand. A huge opportunity that will not even be considered by those who adopt the “actual batteries are rubbish” mindset.
You can’t store power but you can store energy. Until one appreciates the difference between power and energy and understands the need for stability of frequency and voltage in the grid one will continue to imagine that the limitations are political rather than physical and that somehow if we all hope very hard and have faith and goodwill to men etc etc it will all work out. The power that can be extracted from wind is proportional to the cube of the wind speed. That simple physical relationship coupled with the gusting nature of wind in NZ imposes limitations (relating to frequency and voltage stability)on the inroads that wind (in its current configuration)can make which no amount of overall network management or act of faith can mitigate. Physics trumps politics every time. I’m an enthusiast for renewables but ignoring their limitations doesn’t make those limitations go away. Innovation and sound engineering offers the best course of action.
Oh I agree completely that the physical trumps everything, and of course as I said some kind of cheap, light, safe, reliable, endlessly reusable storage device is the Holy Grail, and is being pursed all over the place. But at the moment what we have is the difference between us all buying e-cars today, and the fact that we can’t. So while hoping for tech break throughs isn’t it wise to work with what we have?