You want to 'save the environment' but you can't because of the environment?
As Rishi Sunak opens more oil fields because renewables can't cover the gaps, as EV manufacturers pull back investment because demand falls, as many countries don’t know what to do about the increased power demand if more people do buy EVs, as the Australians increasingly worry about what they will actually do about power production, given they don’t have hydro like we do and as we still haven't answered whether we want to spend $16 billion-plus on Onslow as a bucket for dry years, it seems increasingly pointless coming up with ideas that may work at scale and yet they are turned down to protect the very thing we are trying to protect.
The Tekapo idea was an 88-megawatt plan over 113 hectares. It would have serviced about 13,000 homes.
Now, it may be this project specifically was a bridge too far and in general, it could have worked, but so much of this is open to interpretation and dare we suggest an astonishingly large amount of nimbyism.
The problem, according to Environment Canterbury, was the risk of "permanent and irreversible loss of threatened land environments". What does that actually mean?
It would also "potentially impact indigenous flora and fauna". Potentially? Well, would it or would it not have?
Isn't there "potentially" indigenous flora and fauna everywhere you go in this country? Just what bit of New Zealand are we looking for?
The toxic waste dump where nothing has grown for 1,000 years?
The renewables game is fraught. On one hand, you have the Government looking at Onslow, a project so big it scares off investors in other ideas, and when investors do have other ideas the authorities look for reasons not to do it.
We don't like nuclear. Solar, at scale, needs to avoid mountain, daisies and snails apparently. Wind is a partial solution but is far from the sole answer. And we are a mile behind in offshore wave generation.
So shall we stick with Indonesian coal?
We either want to sort this or we want to find excuses.
How many times do the folks behind the Tekapo solar project and ideas like it, need to be rejected before they say "why would we bother?"
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
The Tekapo idea was an 88-megawatt plan over 113 hectares. It would have serviced about 13,000 homes.
Now, it may be this project specifically was a bridge too far and in general, it could have worked, but so much of this is open to interpretation and dare we suggest an astonishingly large amount of nimbyism.
The problem, according to Environment Canterbury, was the risk of "permanent and irreversible loss of threatened land environments". What does that actually mean?
It would also "potentially impact indigenous flora and fauna". Potentially? Well, would it or would it not have?
Isn't there "potentially" indigenous flora and fauna everywhere you go in this country? Just what bit of New Zealand are we looking for?
The toxic waste dump where nothing has grown for 1,000 years?
The renewables game is fraught. On one hand, you have the Government looking at Onslow, a project so big it scares off investors in other ideas, and when investors do have other ideas the authorities look for reasons not to do it.
We don't like nuclear. Solar, at scale, needs to avoid mountain, daisies and snails apparently. Wind is a partial solution but is far from the sole answer. And we are a mile behind in offshore wave generation.
So shall we stick with Indonesian coal?
We either want to sort this or we want to find excuses.
How many times do the folks behind the Tekapo solar project and ideas like it, need to be rejected before they say "why would we bother?"
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
Solar and wind farms not only look bad in the environment, they are bad for the environment.
What Greenies don't tell you, probably because they don't know, is that the actual operating capacity compared to the nominal capacity of wind and solar farms is only around 30%. So a 100MW farm will on average yield 30MW of power, and at times 0MW.
That's because the wind don't blow all the time, or sometimes blows too strong and they have to be shutdown, and the Sun don't always shine, particularly in winter when it's so weak you get bugger all generation.
That means you need 100% reliable backup for these intermittent and unreliable forms of generation. In this country that's fossil fuels because we don't do nuclear.
So you've paid for double the generation and all the extra CO2 emissions it took to mine all the heavy metals and REE's. Then to mine and process all the steel using coking coal to produce huge numbers of these very low density turbines and panels that are very hard to impossible to recycle at the end of their short generating lives.
Every single intermittent renewable source of energy does not work from a reliability and economic sense excepting unusual circumstances eg solar in a desert, huge government subsidies. Onslow is an enormously expensive way to provide a surprisingly small amount of backup power. Hydro works but might kill a snail - we'll never build another dam. Nuclear works and is literally the safest way to generate large volumes of energy - least deaths per KwH but amateur environmentalists don't understand the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
None of this matters anyway - China currently produces enough greenhouse gases in months to outstrip the UK's entire production since the Industrial Revolution. China and India, quite rationally, decide that cheap power and hundreds of new coal powered power stations will provide massive benefits to their population now as opposed to some potential risks in the future. Expect the rest of Asia and potentially South America to follow.
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