We might even have to build a second or third Huntly power station?

To have New Zealand run out of gas – and oil too eventually. That was the intention of the Oil And Gas Ban that was PM Jacinda Ardern’s “Captains Call” back in 2018, and it’s one Labour Party policy that actually seems to be working, which is not a surprise since it’s easier to destroy than to build.

Over at Kiwiblog DPF is taking a victory lap because the new government has completely overturned this ban, Oil and gas ban goneburger. But while I also applaud this move I don’t think it will make much difference, simply because oil and gas companies are not going to rush back here to invest billions of dollars when the next Lefty government will simply ban them again. That KB post mentions talk of signing long-term contracts that can bypass such things but governments can override commercial contracts if they’re willing to suck up the costs of litigation and paying out the contract, and Labour-Greens are such fanatics on this issue now that probably no sum of money would dissuade them.

And I do have to wonder how many National MP’s secretly think the same? After all, they’re letting Shane Jones run his mouth and as even a talkshow host noted the other day:

You can sort of tell by the language that Shane Jones is using that he might know this too – he’s talking about trying to make it more appealing for investors to come back by giving them really long-term contracts. It’s almost desperate stuff, and I suspect it’s because he can see no one’s nibbling after nine months. And why would they?

The fact that Jones is in charge of this is the tell. Luxon and company believe in Net Zero as the means to combat Climate Change or are too frightened to argue against either theory. So they’re happy to let Shane take the slings and arrows because it keeps NZ Firsters inside the tent and fools National-ACT-NZ First voters who don’t know the business – while also knowing that the business realities of the industry which insiders pointed out six years ago mean the plan’s ultimate failure, which can then be met with a shrug of “Hey, we tried!” and blaming Labour-Greens.

There are plenty more National MP’s where this guy comes from.

Over at Not PC, an article called Giving it the gas takes a look at the current power situation in NZ:

As we were reminded by Transpower on May 10th, we’re so close to being underpowered here that the gap between peak production and consumption on still, cloudy days is dangerously small.

He points out the usual pitiful contribution of solar and wind energy to our needs:

As you were enjoying your breakfast toast and coffee this morning, at today’s first peak-power time, the electricity grid was supplied with 82% renewable power. Good stuff, right! 

As you can see above (and I’ve enlarged it for you just below), the bulk of that renewable power came from hydro — almost two-thirds — with a decent amount (17%) from geothermal. Good stuff. Thank you. But can you see the anaemic offering from the other two renewable contributors, solar and wind? Just 129MW from the country’s wind farms — contributing just 2% to your breakfast toaster — and from solar just a risible 1.3MW. Virtually zero percent.

And that’s a normal morning.

The fundamental truth that has not been faced up to by any political party is that the more renewable energy we build, especially in the form of wind and solar, the more conventional energy generation has to be built to cover it, and that generation has to be gas-fired because there is nothing else that can be ramped up as fast and that is as reliable. (“but what about nuclear pow…?” SLAP).

As the Germans are finding, you basically need two power generation systems running in parallel; a new system of wind and solar; an old system of gas and coal. So basically you’ve doubled your costs, probably more because that backup system won’t be running efficiently with all the stop-start action.

This is why their power costs have increased so much in recent years (“When did the Germans become this stupid?” and “Powerless Europe”). Same with the Australians (“Lessons for National from the Australian Power Crisis“). Our power price increases are steady, relentless and headed in the same direction, if not yet quite as bad.

But they will be.

In a post from 2021, NZ Power Blows, I leveraged off of NotPC’s older posts to look at how much extra electricity we’d need to produce to replace fossil fuels completely and my estimate was that we would have to go from 160PJ to 542PJ, and I especially could not see how renewables could fill that gap and that we would soon approach the limits on reducing demand via things like insulation, LED’s, solar panels, heat pumps and so forth. I updated the post this year because a retired professor of engineering had done the same calculations and figured it at 155 PJ to 425 PJ – but he’d also figured out the costs:

The cost to 2050 will comfortably exceed $550 billion, a workforce comparable in size to the health sector will be required for 30 years, including a doubling of the present number of electrical engineers, and it will need about 10% of the global annual production of lithium, cobalt, neodymium and other materials. 

His costs assume that backup is built in but I put a number on of it 300PJ, and unless we go nuclear that will have to be…. non-renewable power, meaning fossil fuels. We might even have to build a second or third Huntly power station?

Of course that’s impossible, but then so is this whole idea. Aside from the future looking impossible, at least given the political constraints on nuclear, plus the restraints of physics, especially when combined with the constraint of money…

… the history of the last thirty years also gives no comfort, especially since it’s the reason we’ve landed in this space of wafer-thin margins, as NotPC pointed out in his 2021 piece which gathered together his articles from over a decade earlier and re-printed this comment of his from 2012:

if I may continue a well-worn theme of previous posts over several years (No Power; No power, again; Still No Power; ‘More power!’ says India. ‘No power,’ says NZ; Power outrage ) and remind you of several famous power outages (such as Auckland 1998, 2006, 2009 … ) this news and that conclusion above simply confirms what should have been obvious years ago: in this country the lifeblood of production, energy, is running out. Not because New Zealand is short of resources with which to produce energy. But because politicians and earth-first worshippers have declared we are not allowed to use them.

From that “Physics and Money” post is this quote:

Green policies are self limiting. The ultimate backstop on political climate ambition is the catastrophic economic mess green policies cause.