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I suspect National & their allies will only move when a situation like supermarkets refusing to buy eggs happens, but with international purchasers rather than local.
To a degree I suspect that already happens from the major UK supermarket chains, but its likely to only get worse the more we ignore, or regress in our international climate pledges.
The link won't open, I'm not sure if it's a bad link or their website is having issues.
Working now so I guess it was their site.
I had to go to their website and find it, it refuses to work for me.
Yet, to achieve that we need nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our electricity system from a 20th century model dominated by gentailers involving large-scale generation, long distance transmission and concentrated market power to a 21st century one based on local generation, use, trading and storage of renewable sources of electricity.
Oh good grief. We're not going to power a nation with rooftop solar and other small scale power, especially when our peak power usage happens on the coldest nights of the year. Our hydro dams are the backbone of the grid, and they're at the opposite end of the country to our biggest centre of demand.
More local, distributed generation would help with the big problem in our energy system being the big hydro dams being at the opposite end of the country to the biggest source of demand. It's not saying get rid of the big hydro dams, it's saying we'll need a different model for the future.
I'd love some technical details on how you think this will work.
No you wouldn't
Quite frankly, I think both you and the author lack the technical knowledge to make that claim.
Case in point, you're not actually interested. Where's your technical argument oh great one?
My technical argument is there's a good reason why we do things the way we do, and if you want to change, it's on you to prove your way is better.
I have solar. My power bill halved, so total imported units is probably reduced by about 30%. If everyone had solar, demand on the grid would drop by a significant amount.
Your turn. Why would rooftop/local solar and wind not help?
our peak power usage happens on the coldest nights of the year.
I already did, but allow me to expand on that point.
Our hydro dams are, in effect, colossal batteries, and are vital to back up the many other types of renewables we have, including solar, wind, run of the river hydro, and geothermal. Geothermal is a base load, and we don't have control over the output of the others the way we do with hydro. This is why Labour was proposing to build a colossal pumped storage hydro scheme, because they understand this as well as anyone.
We need them, we will always need them, and we need a national grid to bring power from them to the rest of the country. Your solar doesn't do anything on a cold winter night.
Who said anything about removing our hydro?
Absolutely nobody apart from you, stop creating strawman arguments.
Yet, to achieve that we need nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our electricity system from a 20th century model dominated by gentailers involving large-scale generation, long distance transmission and concentrated market power to a 21st century one based on local generation, use, trading and storage of renewable sources of electricity.
The author of the article does seem to think we won't need them in the future though.
Absolutely nobody apart from you, stop creating strawman arguments.
If you aren't suggesting that the article recommends removing hydro from our network, what, exactly, is your problem? The idea is that rooftop solar, wind, and other locally-based power generation systems will eventually reduce or eliminate the demand for large centralized hydro and coal generators. Why is this a bad thing? What is your problem with having this as a goal?
The author of the article does seem to think we won’t need them in the future though.
Not needing them is not the same as removing them is it? So if hydro is going away, how exactly is rooftop solar and other local generation a bad thing that won't work, as you have implied?
I'm actually not sure what you're trying to say here.
Shocking
It's very common for solar installations to have batteries these days. That goes a long way to reducing peak load.
I've seen the cost involved with house batteries, they're not cheap at all. You still need the grid to back you up, especially if electricity is your sole source of heat.
I thought your point was that solar doesn't help peak generation? Batteries are far cheaper per amount stored than they were 10 years ago, and power is more expensive.
Also one massive difference now compared to 10 years ago is that many banks will lend you cheap money in order to install solar (among other things), including battery systems. The only criteria is that you have a mortgage with them. Solar is massive business at the moment, when I checked it seemed there are dozens of companies doing solar and battery installs in Wellington alone.
From Wikipedia
The highest peak demand recorded in New Zealand was 7,100 MW, recorded between 18:00 and 18:30 on 9 August 2021.[70] The previous record was 6,924 MW, recorded between 18:00 and 18:30 on 29 June 2021.[71][72]
Correct, solar isn't doing very much at that time of day, meaning you need a house battery to store and release energy in order to actually use the energy you generate.
Now, it's not cost effective to size your battery to the point where you never need power from the grid, so most people will likely spec them to see them through the evening peak, most of the time. On days of peak demand, I imagine most of them would end up using power from the grid.
Things get even more absurd when you introduce EVs into the mix, because you then would be charging batteries off your batteries in order to use the car the next day.
The whole energy storage thing can be done much cheaper, and without the nasty chemicals in batteries, at grid scale with hydro.
I agree we are a long way from not needing a grid. I think the point of residential solar is that if you have solar panels on lots of houses, then part of the peak can be managed by stored power in batteries. You do this by using variable cost power (like some companies already do) along with battery systems that can schedule power from the battery for high cost times. All this technology already exists ,and means we don't need more capacity (especially long distance line capacity) for moving the power, or for producing it because the issue is peak production not total production.
Pumped hydro is a great idea for power storage but the poster-child project has been cancelled now so it remains to be seen what will come of that.
