So the Government says it wants to make it harder for New York bankers and Canadian music stars to buy a slice of heaven down under, the truth is, it has no intention of actually stopping such land sales, and land is only a fraction of what is being flogged off shore.

New Zealanders are rightly upset that the world’s wealthy are buying up so-called trophy properties, including our high country, beach and lake fronts, so they can escape from an increasingly overcrowded, polluted and violent world. Kiwis paying high rents or wanting to buy a home are also frustrated that residential property prices are artificially inflated because small-time foreign investors want to get rich at their expense…”

http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/other8068.html

Why push Ahmed Zhaoui’s rights and smacking? Ahmed Zhaoui could have been handled as a mess and sorted but Kieth’s anti SIS/ US paranoia showed through, and Sue sailed in between parents and their children.

Many people would look at the above document and think oh but they don’t really understand the economy. People rate economists with surgeons and the deeper they are in the system (surrounded by money) the more credibility they are deemed to have. To convince more people your gonna have to go deeper into the counter arguments. I think we need to have a drive to get more people improving their knowledge of economic issues. Confucius once noted that without a strong (well reasoned argument) a person can do little better than mimic a fish out of water.

It seems to me that as a country we have no plan (although the free marketeers would probably conclude that we don’t need one). In the 1960’s and 70’s we were building dams. Now we are selling off as much land as we can to foreigners, and talking about the advantages of a greater population… (and the need for nuclear power plants) with little though to exporting or comparative advantage.

Pull your finger out Green Party!

I commented above (2 Dec 2007) that the electricity generated by the wind farm could generate foreign currency. I suggested as an example that any saving in natural gas use could be used to substitute for imported fuels. However a more direct way of earning foreign currency is by way of our aluminium smelter, which in dry years has been forced to cut back production of aluminium, which would have otherwise been exported. In addition, although we don’t import or export natural gas (at the moment), I believe we do export products made from natural gas, namely ammonia and/or urea. (Urea is made from ammonia, which in turn is made from hydrogen, which is made from natural gas, all at the Petrochem plant in Taranaki.)

Do you agree with this line of reasoning, or have I missed something?

Of course, for this to be significant, the wind farm would have to generate a respectable amount of electricity, which the Te Uku wind farm might be struggling to do.

Trevor.

Trevor.

Trevor.

I disagree. Hydro stations can react quickly to load (or supply) changes. In fact, the frequency regulating station is usually a hydro station - that’s all we’ve got in the South island. Coal-fired stations can’t be brought on line quickly and can only react quickly if they are already fired up.

I believe that Huntley was built to meet the total annual load and the peak demands of the North Island, rather than for short-term grid stability.

This doesn’t really affect Sean’s argument. Wind power is useful, but has its problems and the most obvious one is its short term variability, which on one site can be from nothing to full power or vice versa in 15 minutes or so. Spacial diversity helps - i.e. installing wind farms in different areas so they are affected by different weather. However you still need enough despatchable power to meet the demands, and wind power isn’t despatchable.

Trevor.

“The CO2 emissions arising from electricity generation depend on the fuel used: nuclear power has
almost zero emissions, coal firing is usually taken as 0.86 tCO2/MWh and gas as about 0.3
tCO2/MWh. The generally accepted grid average is 0.43 tCO2/MWh”

Another reference is
http://www.ref.org.uk/images/pdfs/Whiteco2.pdf
which gives values of 0.43 to 0.86 (the latter figure is for coal) and gives some of the complexities involved with determining these figures.

That value of 0.1 looks decidedly unrealistic as a figure for electricity from gas generation. It looks more like a New Zealand grid average, which could be out of date since we have used more thermal power in recent years. In any case, the value for displaced generation should be somewhere between the gas and coal figures, i.e. around 0.4-0.8.

Trevor.

PS: the figures are tonnes of CO2 per MegaWatt-Hour or kilograms of CO2 per kiloWatt-Hour, which are equivalent.