Since the really heavy rainfall is in south Westland maybe your scheme could pump the water around the southern tip of the Alps to the storage lakes in the MacKenzie basin, reversing the flow in the hydro canals, then over Burkes Pass down onto the plains.

Solves the hydro storage and water shortage problems with one scheme.

your thinking looks to come down to price of water in a situation of relative scarcity. w.coast heaps, oz and canterbury none. i wonder how desalination costs stack up against your pipes and siphons. if you say it can be done i’m happy to accept your word.

gilt edge infrastructure bonds anyone?

Thanks for pointing out that the plains are higher. How much I suppose I would have to look up and then there would be an efficiency penalty, but it really does not matter. It can be done… and windmills supplement a pure hydro scheme nicely.

The real point is that the water is valuable as long as it is collected before it mixes with the sea and becomes salted, and that there is a lot of it and it comes down on the west coast in amounts that are larger than in most other parts of the planet, not merely more than what is useful on the west coast. This is certainly a surplus and to retrieve it before it reaches the sea would be a middling big project that would pay off for many generations.

Hydro energy is not wasted water unless the last 100 meters of so of head is used completely, otherwise it can be retained for irrigation too… but even loading it onto sailing ships and scooting it around the coast or over to Oz ( think “Adelaide” ) could be worthwhile. There’s energy value is in it not being mixed with the sea yet.

The waste we’ve tolerated in our arrangements is not small.

Heating uninsulated houses with electrical resistance heat because we have so much hydro-electricity that its pretty close to free is an attitude problem NZ had 20-50 years ago… and we’re getting smarter now, but as my sainted Aunt used to say “too soon old, too late smart”.

respectfully
BJ

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde).

Unfortunately this quote was widely misused by opponents of rogernomics, in the days before the internet made it easy to check obscure facts. Its real meaning sums up Charlie Pederson’s attitude to combatting global warming. Might I respectfully suggest you use the full quote whenever you are confronted by a climate deniallist or any of those “whats good for the environment is bad for the economy” loonies.

BJ

There is one simple fact you have overlooked. Inland Canterbury has a much higher elevation than any accessable reservior site on the West Coats. The Southern Alps are the result of colliding tectonic plates. The collision point is at sea level on the western side of the Alps a mere 20km from Aurthurs Pass summit. This is why the Otira Viaduct has a 1 in 8 gradient. Canterbury is on top of the worlds biggest shingle fan and the inland plains are well above sea level. Consequently the Otira rail tunnel, which provides a river to river connection, slopes steeply down from east to west. Therefore your irrigation tunnel will need to move water a long way uphill, although you might be able to acheive this with conventional windmill technology rather than using electric pumps.

respectfully
BJ

It’s possible to move the water without penalizing yourself so greatly. What is actually the issue is collecting it before it rushes all the way to the ocean. That’s something that will take a bit of construction and piping and such. Not particularly difficult. A collection reservoir and a pipe to go over/through the mountains… parts of it would be sealed to manage to run as a siphon. Some of the energy of the water descending to the reservoir could be used to lift it, some water would thus escape to the sea. A longer pipe can avoid some of the lift. Or lift it with pumps and power them from hydro on the other side where the water is falling….

What I describe IS possible and do-able and will even be economically feasible and attractive once the price of not having enough water on the side of the mountains where the cows live gets high enough. I don’t know many “Cantabrians” so maybe they’re smart or maybe not, or maybe none of them have thought through the issue… yet. Their shortage of water is a relatively new thing, a decade or so ago the aquifer was healthy enough, no?

The water is there. It needn’t cost a lot of extra energy to move it, even without drilling tunnels through the whole of the alps. There is a cost of forgoing the straight collection of energy as it runs down the western slopes with the water wasted into the sea at the bottom, but that’s never been energy we were counting on.

Not impossible at all.

respectfully
BJ

Next time I go that way I am going to take a photo and I urge any one travelling up those roads to take photo’s and put the time and date on the back of the photo and put it on this blog.

Documentation is important it’s one of the best weapons of the activist.

“Water is one of the few things we CAN export if we’re half clever about it”

rubbish. we’re not going to find a way to get water from west coast to canterbury in a hurry. many cantabrians ARE half clever and nothing’s been suggested to date.

i suspect if we were to move water across the alps we’d use all the energy that our energy exporters (as you put it) need. some reality bj.

if we continue exporting natural capital (in the form of dairy, and yes, hydro fuels tiwai point, so exporting alu. is also exporting water) we’re exporting our future. in which case mr pederson’s livelihood hangs in the balance.

cheers
mike