Heather du Plessis Allan: We need to rethink whether this is the kind of country, and electricity system we want to be running

I'll tell you what, this morning I woke up at seven basically on the dot and when I looked at the time, I thought jeez, it's seven and I pulled my charger out of my phone because just so that I wasn't the one who tipped the entire country into darkness. 

It was a relief, wasn't it, that we managed to make it, make it through two hours this morning without the power going out. 

Apparently, according to Transpower, it's basically the reason that we managed to do it is because we all chipped in. 

We all did our bit, the major electricity users did there. 

But in between all of us, we managed to save about 260 megawatts in terms of demand. And that's actually not a bad effort by us, because, yesterday the forecast was that they were going to be down 200 megawatts. 

So, we did pretty well. But we need to talk about this because this is not going to be the last time this year that we get this message and that we have to rally and pull our phones out of the chargers, take the bike off the charge. Do not put the kettle on, do not put the dishwasher on, do not put the washing machine on, do not heat rooms you're not in and turn all the lights out. This is basically what it's going to be like this winter and it's probably going to be like this for many winters ahead of us.

 The reason for that is because we're trying to go green. Basically, we're trying to run on solar, wind and water. And if you do that, if there's not enough solar wind or water, you basically, the only other thing you can do is stop the demand, turn everything off. 

And the other thing also, which is a major problem is that we're running out of gas and we're running out of gas really fast, like alarmingly fast, we're running out of gas. Now, bear this in mind when we pulled our charges out of our phones this morning and turn the lights out, that did make a difference. 

But that was small beer compared to what was actually making the difference, which was Tiwai Aluminum Smelter, cutting its electricity use and Methanex using less gas and industry basically pulling less electricity out of the system. 

What that means is that we had to go to all of these big money-making companies in this country and ask them to stop working and they did, which means that for those two hours. 

And however long it took them to, you know, power things down and then power things back up again, which in the case of the Tiwai aluminum smelter would I imagine be hours. 

It means they made less money. 

Which means because a lot of them are exporters, the country made less money because of this morning's power shortage. 

Now, maybe once you know, happens on the ninth, 10th of May 2024 you don't really care all that much.   

But if you're doing this multiple times a year and you are doing this multiple years, that stuff adds up. We are literally, we are literally becoming poorer as a country because we cannot rely on our electricity. That's pretty third world, isn't it? That's weird.

Did we choose this? Oh, yes. That's right. Some of us did. Some of us wanted to do this. This was a choice. We need to rethink.  

I would suggest we need to rethink really quickly, whether this is the kind of country we want to be running, whether this is the kind of electricity system we want to be running.

Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.