“California today, Australia tomorrow” tweets Malcolm Roberts as Californians are asked to turn off their power this week in the middle of a very hot summer’s day afternoon. Californian fires have been burning for weeks. No air conditioning for you says LA’s mayor. Presumably, hospitals have back up fossil fuel generators.
If our coalition government wasn’t so tardy we would be next. Happily, we dodged this bullet thanks to their inability to deliver their punitive quest for zero net carbon emissions by 2050; this is the solitary upside of a clown show running our energy sector.
Overseas experience shows reliance on solar and wind power is not sustainable.
Megan Woods was asked last year which new technologies and energy sources will kick in when our dwindling supplies of natural gas run out. She couldn’t say. National’s Energy and Resources spokesperson Jonathan Young explains.
“That’s because Dr Woods doesn’t have a feasible plan to ensure new technology and energy sources will arrive soon enough and with enough scale to make up for the loss of gas.
Her answer in Parliament that New Zealand needs 4.5 new windfarms a year, but couldn’t say how much electricity that represented, shows us that she has no idea on New Zealand’s needs for electricity, and how to meet the growing demand.”
The Energy Minister has no idea how much electricity we need?
“It is a sad irony that in the first year of a Government that talks a big game on climate change, New Zealand burned the most coal in five years to keep the lights on, National’s Energy and Resources spokesperson Jonathan Young says.
“It’s a foretaste of the imbalances to come. New Zealand only has certainty of supplies of natural gas to generate electricity for the next six years. Beyond that Energy Minister Megan Woods has no way of knowing how soon new technologies and energy sources can fill the gap.”
Well they had to use coal didn’t they? Without it we wouldn’t have had enough power to meet demand because hydro on its own isn’t enough.
At the end of 2018 Genesis Energy imported its first shipments of coal from Indonesia. The sad fact is that we now rely on imported coal while our own coal resources lie mothballed underground.
“New Zealand has in-ground coal resources of more than 16 billion tonnes, of which 80% are lignite in the South Island. There are also substantial resources of sub-bituminous coal in both islands, and a lesser amount of high-quality bituminous coal, mainly on the West Coast of the South Island.”
With coal exploration development work our coal reserves would increase but the reason coal mining became unpopular is two-fold. First, the Pike River Mine was an unmitigated disaster. Think where we might be today if open-cast mining had accessed the high grade coking coal at Pike River. 29 people would still be alive and we’d be halfway through a very lucrative coking coal export contract.
A very small section of the 430 square metre Paparoa National Park would have to be destroyed for open-cast mining, but remedial work would be carried out once mining ceases; the same requirement for mining companies operating elsewhere, whereby funds are earmarked throughout the life of the mine for remediation work.
Pike River Mine was working the Brunner coal seam, mined since 1864, and responsible for the Brunner Mine explosion in 1896 which is still the worst mining disaster in NZ history because it killed 65 people.
But the most important factor by far killing off mining is the conservation movement. The seventies and eighties saw substantial input from NZ Forest and Bird into designating the now 30% of the country as national parks. Forest and Bird focus on conservation activism rather than bird life and is politically active with no economic responsibility whatsoever. Eugene Sage is their parliamentary arm after campaigning for them for thirteen years.
Paparoa National Park is a mixture of beautiful coastline and bush interspersed with inaccessible, scrubby mountainous terrain. The park was established in 1987 and is administered by the Department of Conservation. Under their watch 14 people died in 1995 when a DoC constructed viewing platform collapsed at Cave Creek, proving the treacherous terrain to be a high risk for tourism too.
The government’s lockdown killed off tourism, their renewables policy killed off oil and gas exploration, but their one size fits all approach to conservation was an economic and natural disaster for the mining industry.
Unless the government commits to economic recovery instead of following idealistic and misplaced conservation goals at any price our economic future is bleak.
Take a look at our future through these images of overseas renewable energy failures. We are following in their footsteps with our unachievable conservationist regimes.
Westhoff. An early windfarm, now in disrepair and mostly offline.
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