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Monday, May 13, 2024

Mike's Minute: We could solve our winter problem, but we don't


To add to an already farcical set of circumstances as we yet again woke up to the fact we don’t produce enough power in this country and so will spend another winter playing stupid games around how to save and what to turn off, Vector entered the debate by announcing their frustration around EV's.

"We need regulation" they tell us. It's not really news considering they have been on about it for years.

They have been asking the Government for four years to make a decision around regulating things like charging stations, load spread, when to charge and how much to charge for charging etc.

Two issues came out of that. The first is the fact they had been asking for four years and, as they said, of the multiple people in Government they spoke to, no one had made a decision.

The second point is they sighted states in Australia who had made the decision and indeed passed the laws.

The irony of that is that no one outside America is further behind the EV discussion than Australia.

EV's have not been big sellers, the charging network is virtually non-existent and it's all predicated on the idea that mainly Australians like utes and it's also a really big country, so EV's don’t suit the landscape and distances. And yet, the laws have been passed.

That is called preparation and planning.

In the meantime, here in Dumpty Doo Land, the Government in question, i.e Labour, were busy spruiking the EV revolution, which as we have seen, is not really a revolution any more given sales have fallen off a cliff. It tells us to buy one, subsidising us into one, and at no stage, despite the energy industry asking, did any of them get around to the very obvious follow up work of making sure we have the resource to actually make it all happen.

It's like building a house and forgetting the windows, joinery and roof.

That is a specific example. Of the much bigger picture, the mistake that was made was the gap between leaving fossil fuel behind and entering the fulltime world of renewables.

The same way they didn’t think about resourcing EV's, they didn’t think about what would happen if they cut off the gas but didn’t have the windmills ready.

Now, none of that is about the RMA, or budgets or things beyond their influence or control.

It is just plain simple lack of prep, lack of acumen, lack of attention to detail and a lack of vision.

So the winter of 2024 is like the winter of 2023 - fragile, uneconomic, messy, backward and inept.

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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As the engineering for fossil fuel cars gets better and better and as the fossil fuel refining processes and lubricants development gets better and better, why do we need EVs and the additional inordinate pressure they put on systems ( that may or may not exist) not to mention the general ignored issue of end of life disposal.