Source: ACT Party
The Haps
ACT and its Ministers are being attacked for an unusual reason. They are being too effective. Karen Chhour really is making Oranga Tamariki colourblind and child centric. Nicole McKee is introducing common sense into gun laws. Yesterday National Ministers announced electronic road pricing to ease congestion and electronic payment cards to prevent welfare abuse. Both are ACT coalition commitments. No wonder the Left are losing their rag at ACT. As core ACT supporters, Free Press readers are making a difference.
The Energy Crisis
If you rank countries by the standard of living people enjoy, and the amount of energy people consume, they’re basically the same ranking. Unless you’re a monk, more energy equals a better life.
If you’re feeling poorer, it might be because we’re getting short of energy. Labour’s solution was to give people more money in winter, they called it the winter energy payment. We know that no Government can buy its way out of a fundamental problem, just like welfare doesn’t solve poverty.
The solution has to be striking at the root of the issue. There is not enough electricity and gas in this country. That problem in turn is caused by a lack of investment in generation and gas discovery.
There will always be people who want to blame ‘the market.’ If only the Government owned the generators and did it for the people, not profit, salvation would arrive. If only.
The truth is Government could do electricity fairly well when the world was much simpler. When New Zealand consisted of three million people, some very big dams, and all-you-can-burn coal, running electricity networks was simpler.
Then things got tricky. More people, more of them environmentalists, and more kinds of generation than just hydro and coal, made the system more complicated. The whole thing got harder for the old New Zealand Electricity Department to plan.
Separating out generators, retailers, lines companies and Transpower was and is the best model. Letting private companies invest in new generation capacity is better than politicians and Government officials with little commercial expertise or incentives working it out.
Nonetheless we’re short of power, so what gives? There’s not enough fuel. By fuel we mean water in the dams, gas in the fields, wind in the air, and sun in the sky. The wonderful mild winter we’ve had with still blue skies and little rain is fantastic for running rugby and outdoor dining, but absolutely rubbish for generating electricity.
It doesn’t help that there hasn’t been much in the way of gas finds for the last decade, but what really buggered it up was the Labour (and New Zealand First and Green) Government banning oil and gas exploration. That scared away investment, and the people who could help boost production have left.
It doesn’t help that the same Government threatened Lake Onslow, the massive battery project (it would pump water uphill then let it run down again later to store energy) costing $15 billion dollars. Who would invest in generation when the Government threatens to dump a $15 billion dollar battery on the market?
Then there’s just the general madness that is the RMA. Getting anything done takes too long and costs too much. It needs to be replaced with a property rights-based law.
There are more technical changes that would help. Transpower is regulated to make a return on new lines over five years. If the period were longer, it could invest more and pay off its investments over a longer period. New generators could be hooked up to the grid faster.
Where do all these ideas leave us?
One thing’s for sure. New Zealand won’t get investment if industrial energy is too expensive. New Zealanders won’t live rich lives if they can’t afford energy. If we, as a country, keep shooting ourselves in both feet with bad policies, maybe we don’t deserve to.
What we all need is a cross-party accord on gas exploration, as ACT’s Simon Court has been calling for. We need a new RMA that lets people do stuff as the starting assumption (which Simon Court is also working on). We need to point out projects like Onslow are absurdly silly, so that Labour and friends don’t dare propose them again. It would also help to change Transpower’s regulations so they can invest in more transmission to new generators.
If we do those things, investment in generation will increase so it’s easier to get through winters like we’ve just had. Meanwhile, we’ve all got lots of time opening big power bills to see just how much reckless economic policies hurt in the end.
