Hydro is definitely a valuable component in our electricity infrastructure given its huge storage capacity acting as a long term buffer for the intermittency of wind and solar but the cost of developing Lake Onslow as an addition to that storage capacity does rely on the future of climate related disruption of inflows into the existing dams being proved correct.
The weakness of solar and wind generation is its intermittent nature which other countries counter by way of grid scale battery facilities. We have hydro that can serve the same purpose by dam levels being able to be maintained to an increasing degree as those renewables offset hydro fed consumption. In that same vein the greater prevalence of solar and wind facilities in the North Island can be utilised to offset Waikato River generation to the advantage of mitigating South to North Island transmission. My point is that the ebb and flow of electricity consumption need not be a case of generation needing to be sent the length of the country in order for its benefits to be gained, and in the case of distributed generation such as rooftop solar and domestic scale wind or hydro it is often consumed very close to its source with negligible impact on the grid at large.
The biggest barrier NZ has presently insofar as rectifying our current 'energy crisis' is a government who can't see beyond feathering the nests of their fossil fuel corporate supporters. The Lake Onslow article demonstrates this bias as does Simeon Brown's total ignorance of any generation solution beyond importing LNG. This strategy will expose NZ to rising international pricing for this commodity as well as ensuring the genretailers can maintain high and increasing generation costs due to the broken wholesale electricity pricing structure we are stuck with. And there is definitely something wrong when our government go from concern about agricultural methane emissions in one breath to importing shiploads of methane in the form of LNG in the next.
Apparently though the government is expecting electricity gentailers to stump up for the cost of LNG terminal developments rather than put taxpayers' money in those facilities. The problem is that from what I'm hearing from industry circles is that the electricity sector don't want a bar of investing in such short term and volatile strategies so LNG ain't going to be a thing any time soon.
Also some good info from Dave Borlace on gravity storage systems:
The weakness of solar and wind generation is its intermittent nature which other countries counter by way of grid scale battery facilities. We have hydro that can serve the same purpose by dam levels being able to be maintained to an increasing degree as those renewables offset hydro fed consumption. In that same vein the greater prevalence of solar and wind facilities in the North Island can be utilised to offset Waikato River generation to the advantage of mitigating South to North Island transmission. My point is that the ebb and flow of electricity consumption need not be a case of generation needing to be sent the length of the country in order for its benefits to be gained, and in the case of distributed generation such as rooftop solar and domestic scale wind or hydro it is often consumed very close to its source with negligible impact on the grid at large.
The biggest barrier NZ has presently insofar as rectifying our current 'energy crisis' is a government who can't see beyond feathering the nests of their fossil fuel corporate supporters. The Lake Onslow article demonstrates this bias as does Simeon Brown's total ignorance of any generation solution beyond importing LNG. This strategy will expose NZ to rising international pricing for this commodity as well as ensuring the genretailers can maintain high and increasing generation costs due to the broken wholesale electricity pricing structure we are stuck with. And there is definitely something wrong when our government go from concern about agricultural methane emissions in one breath to importing shiploads of methane in the form of LNG in the next.
Apparently though the government is expecting electricity gentailers to stump up for the cost of LNG terminal developments rather than put taxpayers' money in those facilities. The problem is that from what I'm hearing from industry circles is that the electricity sector don't want a bar of investing in such short term and volatile strategies so LNG ain't going to be a thing any time soon.
Also some good info from Dave Borlace on gravity storage systems: