The folks at Forest and Bird have put together a lovely video of a rafting trip down the Mokihinui River. I commend them and their efforts to save the Mokihinui from destruction.
Should we damn the river and its environs by building a dam? Is building hydro power a reversible decision? I think everyone knows my answer to these important questions.
I agree frog, how dare the bastards ruin this majestic river where I have hauled many a trout and the odd kilo or so of whitebait. This is madness and to hell with a hydro dam on this beautiful river !!
We’ll dam the river and at the other end it will be business as usual (ie) more people to fill the subdivisions “grow the economy” and other such “great achievement” then we’ll need another dam.
How can we “grow the economy” by ripping off half a million chinese? why don’t we just bring in the geet gen slap an inverter on it and poof! your house is off the grid.
you feel it,i feel it,everyone feels it, this model of economics that we , the world has been operating on is in it’s deathrows. We can do without oil,we were given two legs but we can’t do without food.
control the food you control the world!
you guys are right we’l just need more dams
you,me all those born here are the people of this land, it’s time to stop trying to be the frakkin first in everything, hell! we live on two lil islands at the bottom of the world! not a state of the gran ol USA or a new province of china.
Grrr! just who is letting so many in? what about the rest of those who want to come here?
sorry if it sounds racist can’t help it,the built in urge.
genetic proliferation
go ahead bash me, i don’ thave the mask of education to fall back behind.
There has not been in my memory, a single instance of this party accepting and supporting a new hydro dam. Now every single one of these things has a cost in terms of wild rivers being less wild and it is certain that the “Growth-is-always-Good” meme is completely wrong…
BUT
We have to replace a hell of a lot of fossil fuel use in the next 2-3 decades and that’s going to take a hell of a lot of electricity. We have to put up Wind Generators, Tide Generators, Geo-Thermal Generators and Dams wherever we can. We can’t count on the rainfall being the same as it was, we can’t count on the snowfall being the same as it was… the only places where it MAY be reliable will be the west coast of the south island…
That’s not “growth”… that’s replacement. It’s the cheapest guarantee of a future we can hand over to our kids. The Trout will still be in that river.
Good Hydro sites are not common either. There probably is NOT a “somewhere else” to put it, and there is certainly not a “somewhere else” that will be acceptable to some of us.
respectfully
BJ
Not prepared to unconditionally defend this, but supporting reflective not reflexive approaches.
BJ, Would you be comfortable building a hydro dam a couple of miles from the San Andreas fault? Now double that level of discomfort because the Great Alpine Fault currently is rated as twice as likely to deliver a m8+ quake within 30 years.
Either they did their homework on the Geo risk or they didn’t. You got my note about not unconditionally defending…
It is no different from a Nuke in the sense that you can engineer the solution at a price. What is the price, what is the solution?? I don’t have time to explore this but that isn’t the objection I was hearing here.
So when in 5 years time NZ needs another 500MW of reliable baseload power, where would the Greens source it from?
Choosing only proven technologies, the options are hydro, coal, nuclear or gas. Which would the Greens support if not hydro? Can you show that environmentalists have the answers- rather than just knee-jerk reactionaries?
The anti-hydro bias of the Greens has cost them my vote.
bj, A presume you would wait till the paleoseismologists have finished their their (7,000 year geo trench) study in two years time rather than gamble on the results of their earlier 2,000 year geo trench study. They’re fortunate to have found this trench site. This fault appears to deliver M8+ quakes over most of it’s length every few hundred years which tends to make the surface evidence rather short lived. In fact the government should have a moratorium on dam building on the West Coast and in Canterbury until the results of the study are published.
the energy is for dairy and coal expansion (pike river coal) and transmission lines would go thru happy valley.
so the greens are consistant on this one.
———-
I would suggest biomass, tidal and wind for the wild west coast. anyone know of any plans for any of those?
and micro hydro and solar too.
the thing is the west coast has a small population - it is auckland that needs the energy generation, and not the south island that needs to produce New Zealand’s Energy.
——
meridian is not to be trusted anyway, they gave rio tinto cheap power (15% of the countries suplpy) and use coal as well, even thought they plan a ‘green energy’ image. a little like our ’sustainability champion’ helen clark, who loves air travel, coal and cars.
——–
its the energy use that also needs to be looked at.
—what would Meridian’s energy be used for…? who is driving this project?
if you are so knee jeck and luke warm in support for the greens, then you vote prob isnt wanted.
either you support greens policies or you dont. its rather easy.
you know national and labour will support coal, and greens want to push energy (and the coast of energy to tax-payers) in another direction.
So when in 5 years time NZ needs another 500MW of reliable baseload power, where would the Greens source it from?
——————————
Choosing only proven technologies, the options are hydro, coal, nuclear or gas. Which would the Greens support if not hydro? Can you show that environmentalists have the answers- rather than just knee-jerk reactionaries?
The anti-hydro bias of the Greens has cost them my vote.
——————————-
carbon capture and storage isnt proven, neither is the long term sustainability of hydro, (especially is power demands grow, which they are).
we need to follow the Scandinavian approach and build our renewable energy up - have an offshore windmill (or several) and build tida wave energy in areas where people want it.
not destroy our best rivers, for the coal and dairy industry and so energy companies can make a ever large profit, while our power prices rise.
“what would Meridian’s energy be used for…? ” It is going to be used to break the monopoly that masochists have on our very best scenic views. Why walk from Te Anau to Milford Sound or Karamea to Collingwood (and all points in between) when you can enjoy the same views from a gondola gliding gracefully over the tree tops?
Subsidised from petrol taxes of course, as all good public transport should be.
how is meridian controlling the west coast power - breaking a monopoly? look at the dominant companies on the coast.. what gondola are you talking about?
how is mining your scenery and damning the rivers going to improve things?
Given Lake Coleridge hydro plant was opened in 1914ish, and is still a useful resource nearly a century later, I think its fair to say that hydro has a fair track record in the long term front.
But there are some irreconcilable problems for the Greens, and difficult problems even for anti-greens.
Firstly is the question of hydro support
Secondly is where is the electricity the country will need coming from.
NZ was once 100% renewable electricity supplied, but we have let that get away from us; we need to figure out how to get back there, without destroying the country, the planet, or the economy, or freezing to death, and that is going to need some really smart thinking, and some world-leading change.
No evidence of that thought process yet. Suggest the ETS is a step in the right direction and I’ll fall off my chair laughing at how wide one can be of a mark; I said “smart thinking”…
If we have to switch to using more electricity in our transportation aren’t we going to need more power generation to support that.
Does anyone know if the 2025 plan of getting to 95% renewables is factoring in the need to generate more electricty because we have been forced to switch to electricity for transportation.
Have we also factored in the massive upgrade and costs that are going to be needed for the transmission grid.
I still don’t like the greens energy policy since its too dreamy. They need to get some electrical engineers (are their any in the green party) and come up with some sound policy. This wishy washy dreamy green notion of building wind and tidal and solar every where doesn’t cut it, I need real gritty engineered sound policy not pie in the sky dreamy green ravings.
Like BJ i’m one of the few realist greens I just wish their were more like us.
Oh and I am now sick and tired of the word sustainable it seems to be the most used word in NZ political speak these days. The next person who uses it needs to preface it with their definition of what they think it means.
treesoftomorrow, What gondola. Just musing on future options for getting tourists around our scenic spots once cruise ships have converted to sail power. Extending the proposed Milford gondola all the way up the Coast has a certain Jetsons attraction to it.
Realisticly Solid Energy could probably generate the power needed by dairying by capturing coal seam methane.
dbuckley. The solution may lie with the ability of remote telemetry systems to allow distributed generation to be managed in the same way that the Upper Waitaki scheme is currently managed. Similar to the way that the SCATS system co-ordinates arterial traffic lights in Christchurch. That system monitors demand across the network and assigns time at individual intersections to match the overall flow conditions on each artery. Not too different from the approach that would be needed to shuffle power around Transpower’s network to match local demand/generation fluctuations. It just needs replacing a lot of old analogue switches with more modern designs that can handle rapid remote control. The research I’ve seen into this in Eu and USA suggests the switch upgrades should pay for themselves just in reduced transmission system losses and outages.
Kevyn you are hitting on a very important point with regard to NZ’s energy needs everyone talks about renewables etc but nobody ever talks about the elephant in the room which is Transpower’s network and how it needs upgrading.
they wont tho will they, they will work with other SOEs and scratch each others backs, with gerry brownlee or trevor mallards support.
as john key has said: he supports brown coal diesel (lignite) the dirtiest coal there is.
national and labour have roughly the same climate policy: more coal, taxpayer subsides.
i suggest you visit the coast and look at their recycling systems, minings, farming and so on.
they get stuck with the clean up cost, not the companies making the mess and profit.
study opencast stripmining (mountian top removal) in appalacia for a stronger example or the opposite of energy effeciency and sustainability.
and helen clark calls herself a sustainability hero….
and national says it cares about climate change….
————–
Kevyn Says:
May 19th, 2008 at 2:46 am
treesoftomorrow, What gondola. Just musing on future options for getting tourists around our scenic spots once cruise ships have converted to sail power. Extending the proposed Milford gondola all the way up the Coast has a certain Jetsons attraction to it.
Realisticly Solid Energy could probably generate the power needed by dairying by capturing coal seam methane.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
If we want to carry on enjoying the benefits of a 21st century lifestyle then the answer is yes we should dam the Hokonui River.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
I agree frog, how dare the bastards ruin this majestic river where I have hauled many a trout and the odd kilo or so of whitebait. This is madness and to hell with a hydro dam on this beautiful river !!
May 17th, 2008 at 8:30 am
We’ll dam the river and at the other end it will be business as usual (ie) more people to fill the subdivisions “grow the economy” and other such “great achievement” then we’ll need another dam.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Are you saying it’s futile jh? Can’t stop the grind - at any cost. Pity.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:38 am
How can we “grow the economy” by ripping off half a million chinese? why don’t we just bring in the geet gen slap an inverter on it and poof! your house is off the grid.
you feel it,i feel it,everyone feels it, this model of economics that we , the world has been operating on is in it’s deathrows. We can do without oil,we were given two legs but we can’t do without food.
control the food you control the world!
you guys are right we’l just need more dams
you,me all those born here are the people of this land, it’s time to stop trying to be the frakkin first in everything, hell! we live on two lil islands at the bottom of the world! not a state of the gran ol USA or a new province of china.
Grrr! just who is letting so many in? what about the rest of those who want to come here?
sorry if it sounds racist can’t help it,the built in urge.
genetic proliferation
go ahead bash me, i don’ thave the mask of education to fall back behind.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I don’t think there is much danger to the Trout -
http://www.meridianenergy.co.nz/NR/rdonlyres/A9425509-3DC6-4E36-81FB-C 2264FC26A65/0/211TroutMovementandPassage.pdf
I do think there is a danger to the Green party.
There has not been in my memory, a single instance of this party accepting and supporting a new hydro dam. Now every single one of these things has a cost in terms of wild rivers being less wild and it is certain that the “Growth-is-always-Good” meme is completely wrong…
BUT
We have to replace a hell of a lot of fossil fuel use in the next 2-3 decades and that’s going to take a hell of a lot of electricity. We have to put up Wind Generators, Tide Generators, Geo-Thermal Generators and Dams wherever we can. We can’t count on the rainfall being the same as it was, we can’t count on the snowfall being the same as it was… the only places where it MAY be reliable will be the west coast of the south island…
That’s not “growth”… that’s replacement. It’s the cheapest guarantee of a future we can hand over to our kids. The Trout will still be in that river.
Good Hydro sites are not common either. There probably is NOT a “somewhere else” to put it, and there is certainly not a “somewhere else” that will be acceptable to some of us.
respectfully
BJ
Not prepared to unconditionally defend this, but supporting reflective not reflexive approaches.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
BJ, Would you be comfortable building a hydro dam a couple of miles from the San Andreas fault? Now double that level of discomfort because the Great Alpine Fault currently is rated as twice as likely to deliver a m8+ quake within 30 years.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Either they did their homework on the Geo risk or they didn’t. You got my note about not unconditionally defending…
It is no different from a Nuke in the sense that you can engineer the solution at a price. What is the price, what is the solution?? I don’t have time to explore this but that isn’t the objection I was hearing here.
respectfully
BJ
May 17th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
anyone know of the term “Bridge highway” stacking the motorways eliminating the need for space
May 17th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
So when in 5 years time NZ needs another 500MW of reliable baseload power, where would the Greens source it from?
Choosing only proven technologies, the options are hydro, coal, nuclear or gas. Which would the Greens support if not hydro? Can you show that environmentalists have the answers- rather than just knee-jerk reactionaries?
The anti-hydro bias of the Greens has cost them my vote.
May 17th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
bj, A presume you would wait till the paleoseismologists have finished their their (7,000 year geo trench) study in two years time rather than gamble on the results of their earlier 2,000 year geo trench study. They’re fortunate to have found this trench site. This fault appears to deliver M8+ quakes over most of it’s length every few hundred years which tends to make the surface evidence rather short lived. In fact the government should have a moratorium on dam building on the West Coast and in Canterbury until the results of the study are published.
May 17th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Which would the Greens support? Probably geothermal. What is your reason for not considering this a proven technology?
May 18th, 2008 at 11:32 am
the energy is for dairy and coal expansion (pike river coal) and transmission lines would go thru happy valley.
so the greens are consistant on this one.
———-
I would suggest biomass, tidal and wind for the wild west coast. anyone know of any plans for any of those?
and micro hydro and solar too.
the thing is the west coast has a small population - it is auckland that needs the energy generation, and not the south island that needs to produce New Zealand’s Energy.
——
meridian is not to be trusted anyway, they gave rio tinto cheap power (15% of the countries suplpy) and use coal as well, even thought they plan a ‘green energy’ image. a little like our ’sustainability champion’ helen clark, who loves air travel, coal and cars.
——–
its the energy use that also needs to be looked at.
—what would Meridian’s energy be used for…? who is driving this project?
May 18th, 2008 at 11:33 am
i would support tidal energy as the no 1 for NZ to get into - look how much ocean we have. better than seabed mining.
~
May 18th, 2008 at 11:38 am
if you are so knee jeck and luke warm in support for the greens, then you vote prob isnt wanted.
either you support greens policies or you dont. its rather easy.
you know national and labour will support coal, and greens want to push energy (and the coast of energy to tax-payers) in another direction.
So when in 5 years time NZ needs another 500MW of reliable baseload power, where would the Greens source it from?
——————————
Choosing only proven technologies, the options are hydro, coal, nuclear or gas. Which would the Greens support if not hydro? Can you show that environmentalists have the answers- rather than just knee-jerk reactionaries?
The anti-hydro bias of the Greens has cost them my vote.
——————————-
carbon capture and storage isnt proven, neither is the long term sustainability of hydro, (especially is power demands grow, which they are).
we need to follow the Scandinavian approach and build our renewable energy up - have an offshore windmill (or several) and build tida wave energy in areas where people want it.
not destroy our best rivers, for the coal and dairy industry and so energy companies can make a ever large profit, while our power prices rise.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
“what would Meridian’s energy be used for…? ” It is going to be used to break the monopoly that masochists have on our very best scenic views. Why walk from Te Anau to Milford Sound or Karamea to Collingwood (and all points in between) when you can enjoy the same views from a gondola gliding gracefully over the tree tops?
Subsidised from petrol taxes of course, as all good public transport should be.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
how is meridian controlling the west coast power - breaking a monopoly? look at the dominant companies on the coast.. what gondola are you talking about?
how is mining your scenery and damning the rivers going to improve things?
May 18th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
What about energy conservation as an alternative … or would that be too hard?
May 18th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Given Lake Coleridge hydro plant was opened in 1914ish, and is still a useful resource nearly a century later, I think its fair to say that hydro has a fair track record in the long term front.
But there are some irreconcilable problems for the Greens, and difficult problems even for anti-greens.
Firstly is the question of hydro support
Secondly is where is the electricity the country will need coming from.
NZ was once 100% renewable electricity supplied, but we have let that get away from us; we need to figure out how to get back there, without destroying the country, the planet, or the economy, or freezing to death, and that is going to need some really smart thinking, and some world-leading change.
No evidence of that thought process yet. Suggest the ETS is a step in the right direction and I’ll fall off my chair laughing at how wide one can be of a mark; I said “smart thinking”…
May 18th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
If we have to switch to using more electricity in our transportation aren’t we going to need more power generation to support that.
Does anyone know if the 2025 plan of getting to 95% renewables is factoring in the need to generate more electricty because we have been forced to switch to electricity for transportation.
Have we also factored in the massive upgrade and costs that are going to be needed for the transmission grid.
I still don’t like the greens energy policy since its too dreamy. They need to get some electrical engineers (are their any in the green party) and come up with some sound policy. This wishy washy dreamy green notion of building wind and tidal and solar every where doesn’t cut it, I need real gritty engineered sound policy not pie in the sky dreamy green ravings.
Like BJ i’m one of the few realist greens I just wish their were more like us.
Oh and I am now sick and tired of the word sustainable it seems to be the most used word in NZ political speak these days. The next person who uses it needs to preface it with their definition of what they think it means.
May 18th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
realist or national lite?
May 18th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
greenpeace also has a document on energy paths for NZ
May 19th, 2008 at 2:46 am
treesoftomorrow, What gondola. Just musing on future options for getting tourists around our scenic spots once cruise ships have converted to sail power. Extending the proposed Milford gondola all the way up the Coast has a certain Jetsons attraction to it.
Realisticly Solid Energy could probably generate the power needed by dairying by capturing coal seam methane.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:00 am
dbuckley. The solution may lie with the ability of remote telemetry systems to allow distributed generation to be managed in the same way that the Upper Waitaki scheme is currently managed. Similar to the way that the SCATS system co-ordinates arterial traffic lights in Christchurch. That system monitors demand across the network and assigns time at individual intersections to match the overall flow conditions on each artery. Not too different from the approach that would be needed to shuffle power around Transpower’s network to match local demand/generation fluctuations. It just needs replacing a lot of old analogue switches with more modern designs that can handle rapid remote control. The research I’ve seen into this in Eu and USA suggests the switch upgrades should pay for themselves just in reduced transmission system losses and outages.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:41 am
Kevyn you are hitting on a very important point with regard to NZ’s energy needs everyone talks about renewables etc but nobody ever talks about the elephant in the room which is Transpower’s network and how it needs upgrading.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:28 am
they wont tho will they, they will work with other SOEs and scratch each others backs, with gerry brownlee or trevor mallards support.
as john key has said: he supports brown coal diesel (lignite) the dirtiest coal there is.
national and labour have roughly the same climate policy: more coal, taxpayer subsides.
i suggest you visit the coast and look at their recycling systems, minings, farming and so on.
they get stuck with the clean up cost, not the companies making the mess and profit.
study opencast stripmining (mountian top removal) in appalacia for a stronger example or the opposite of energy effeciency and sustainability.
and helen clark calls herself a sustainability hero….
and national says it cares about climate change….
————–
Kevyn Says:
May 19th, 2008 at 2:46 am
treesoftomorrow, What gondola. Just musing on future options for getting tourists around our scenic spots once cruise ships have converted to sail power. Extending the proposed Milford gondola all the way up the Coast has a certain Jetsons attraction to it.
Realisticly Solid Energy could probably generate the power needed by dairying by capturing coal seam methane.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:29 am
realistically no one in govt is going to tell solid energy what to do.