Source: Radio New Zealand
Sputnik via AFP
Solar advocates, electricians and consumer campaigners are among those calling on the government to ditch its plans for an LNG import terminal and consider other options.
The Sustainable Energy Association and six other organisations, including the Green Building Council, Master Electricians, and Consumer NZ, have joined together to present an alternative proposal to deal with the country’s winter energy problem.
The new Smart Energy Alliance says that includes rapidly rolling out rooftop solar, moving domestic users off gas, and better managing the country’s hydro lakes.
The government announced in February it would proceed with plans to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) import facility in Taranaki, with whole-of-life costs spread across all electricity users through a levy.
The proposal, widely criticised at the time, has attracted renewed opposition after Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz prompted the price of fossil fuels – including LNG – to spike.
Gentailer chief executives were the latest to express doubts at the energy sector’s conference last week.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) said in a statement last month that the LNG terminal was selected from a shortlist of five options that it considered “timely, feasible and of sufficient scale to meet dry year needs”.
It would also be beneficial to major industrial gas users, who had been forced to limit production or shut up shop altogether in recent years as domestic gas supply dwindled, the ministry said.
It said rooftop solar would support energy resilience in the longer term, but ruled it out as an immediate solution to the dry-year risk.
A Cabinet paper said distributed solar would not supply enough additional energy during winter, when the country was most likely to experience an energy shortage.
The options the ministry seriously considered – including more diesel and coal generation – were all capable of generating 1.5 terawatt hours of generation, no matter the weather, and could be deployed with a few years.
Smart Energy Alliance spokesperson Gareth Williams said the organisation did not accept the argument that solar was incapable of supporting the dry-year risk.
“It’s correct that solar isn’t the greatest resource in winter, but the modelling that we’ve done… shows that solar is really useful in terms of dry-year because it enables the [hydro] lakes to go into autumn and winter much fuller than they do currently,” he said.
“It was a very bold statement that it’s not relevant.”
What the country really needed was for politicians to agree on a cross-party energy strategy that properly weighed up all the options, Williams said.
“This constant change as to what we’re looking to do through every election cycle is just not going to lead to a good outcome.”
However, distributed rooftop solar was among the obvious solutions that should be rolled out straight away, he said.
Countries as diverse as Australia, Hungary and Pakistan have achieved massive uptake of rooftop solar and battery installations within a few years of rolling out government incentives.
A truly meaningful roll-out here would also need financial incentives.
“[Low-cost] financing by itself has some impact but the real acceleration comes when there’s some kind of rebate,” he said.
“Once it’s moving it has its own momentum and you don’t need [incentives] anymore.”
While solar capacity was built up, coal – which was already in the country – was capable of filling the gap that LNG would otherwise close.
“There is sufficient back-up from the Huntly power station using coal,” Williams said.
“Clearly we don’t want that to be the long-term solution… but as a temporary stop-gap for the next three or four years until those other projects can be accelerated, then we’re perfectly covered.”
Incentives could be particularly targeted at domestic gas users – which would have the additional benefit of saving limited gas supply for major industrial users who had limited alternatives, he said.
“The modelling we did looked for that 2TWh of additional generation, and we modelled it by reducing the amount of gas that was being used for electricity generation down to 45 percent of what it has been over the last three years.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
