When the independent chairman of an NZX-listed windfarm company makes a public call for this country to think really seriously about building a nuclear power plant then maybe we should all start thinking seriously about the proposition too.
Craig Stobo, chairman of NZ Windfarms Limited, which operates turbines on the Manawatu hills with a tiny installed generating capacity of a 45.5 megawatts (MW), made the call during his weekly appearance on the internet radio station The Platform.
Stobo is a man with serious business credibility. In a former life he designed the Portfolio Investment Entities (PIE) scheme on which much of our managed funds industry is based. He’s also been recently appointed as the new chair of the Financial Markets Authority (FMA), the finance industry police force.
That a supposed champion of renewable energy can be so upfront about in-depth consideration of the nuclear option reflects the cold harsh reality that New Zealand electricity generation has just not kept pace with population increases of the last thirty two years.
Because it was in 1992 that the Clyde hydro-electric power station started generating. With an installed capacity of 464 MW and providing around 2100 gigawatt hours (GWh) each year, it’s the third largest power station in the country behind Huntly and Manapouri.
But here’s the thing. We haven’t built a power plant of any sort with a generating capacity of more than 150 MW since Clyde came online. In that time the population’s increased from 3.5 million to 5.2 million.
It’s the story of New Zealand infrastructure in the last three decades. We have more people but we’ve built barely enough schools, roads and hospital beds to keep up, and now the inattention to electricity generation is beginning to hurt us.
Using the simple economic laws of supply and demand and with demand outstripping supply this week, wholesale prices – charged by the generators to the suppliers – have been in excess of $800 a megawatt hour (MWh). That’s 80 cents a kilowatt hour (KWh), the units your household power bill is charged in.
It doesn’t take much to realise that retailers and suppliers cannot keep buying their power at 80 cents a unit and on-selling it at around 30 cents a unit – which is about what most households pay.
Either retail prices are going to increase and increase sharply, or we generate more power for the market to bring prices back to a reasonable level.
The current situation is exacerbated by a perfect weather storm at the moment. The hydro lake levels are low because of a lack of autumn and winter precipitation, and the hydro generators are loath to put too much water through the turbines. Then this mild late winter means not much wind, and there’s been a lot of cloud.
Wind and solar account for less than ten percent of our electricity generation anyway so are not really major players.
What’s hurting is that the backup supply for dry winters in the hydro lakes, the Huntly Power Station, is still having to import coal from Indonesia and is running short of natural gas because the previous Labour Prime Minister said six years ago we couldn’t go looking for anymore.
That decision is now really hurting. We may or may not have found more gas reserves since 2018, but we certainly could have used some of our own coal instead of importing 240,000 tonnes last year, at a probable cost to Genesis Energy of about $30 million. Thankfully last year’s importation was down from the staggering 1,845,000 tonnes brought here in 2021.
Now we’re making plans to import liquid natural gas (LNG) from Australia to keep the gas peakers going at Huntly.
Either way, we are too dependent on a thermal power station to keep the lights on when it doesn’t rain or snow in the South Island.
And that comes back to not continuing to invest in power generation at any scale in the last thirty years.
To be honest wind farms and solar farms are just nipping at the fringes. There is no battery storage for either mode of generation. Solar is useless after dark and a wind farm is no use on a calm day.
Geothermal generation is worthwhile and now accounts for about 18 percent of our power. There are 20 plants around the country but the biggest is still Wairakei, first commissioned in 1958, with an installed capacity of 175 MW and an annual output of 1310 GWh.
There is potential for growth in geothermal but not to the extent of building a power station with the output of either a Manapouri or a Clyde, and certainly not Huntly’s installed capacity of 953 MW.
Hydro power remains the backbone of the industry and we built and built and built during the 20th century from Arapuni in 1924 to Clyde in 1992.
But in 1991 came this thing called the Resource Management Act and up went the stop sign.
The price we’re paying is $800 a MWh.
It’s obvious to Blind Freddy that we need more power generation, and at scale. Tinkering around the edges with solar and wind and geothermal is not investing for the future. We need a big power scheme to reinvigorate generation and to make sure we don’t run out of the stuff when the lakes are low and the gas runs out.
Lake Onslow’s pumped hydro was a plan, but it was a ludicrously expensive one. Other more traditional hydro schemes, which would have been the way forward in a past era, are out of favour too, not least because of the ludicrous legal battles over iwi claims that they somehow have more of a right to water than the rest of us. They don’t, but they have so much money to pay lawyers to argue the point that we’ll all be cold and in the dark before the issue is settled.
There is no future for any country that has to import fuel sources to generate electricity, especially when we have plenty of the stuff ourselves. So we either have to get real about using our own coal and gas reserves, or we have to think seriously, really seriously, about another form of power generation – the nuclear reactor.
It is a political scandal that our country’s leaders have not bothered to advance the discussion - ever - on nuclear power. We were so smugly comfortable with our hydro base we thought we’d never need it.
Well now we do.
It’s actually a very common form of power generation across the developed world. There’re about 440 nuclear power plants around the globe producing about 9 percent of the planet’s electric power, and 22 percent of Europe’s. The 70th anniversary of the first plant, near Moscow in June 1954, has just been marked.
When you watch the woke Olympics in Paris with their uncomfortable cardboard beds and vegan meals for the athletes, remember that France is home to 56 nuclear power stations.
The pushback against nuclear power always includes the names Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Of those three high profile accidents only Chernobyl resulted in an immediate loss of life, and the historically considered aftermath of both Three Mile Island and Fukushima suggests there was negligible long-term impact on those communities either.
But three incidents in 70 years across the nearly 500 nuclear plants that have been built in that time says nuclear power stations are not the humanity threatening beasts many make them out to be.
They also produce a greenhouse gas emissions-free form of electricity and don’t have to worry about the weather. What’s not to like?
An estimated cost of construction nuclear plant suggests it would about half that of Lake Onslow’s $30 billion. Yes, a huge price tag, but it’s called an investment.
The way things work in this country, a nuclear power station is not going to be built in a hurry. But then neither is a hydro dam nor a thermal plant, and geothermal, wind and solar cannot make the sizeable contribution to generation the country so desperately needs.
When an establishment figure like Craig Stobo, with his significant environmental credentials, starts making calls for nuclear power then shouldn’t we stand up and take notice?
And that means you too Christopher Luxon, Simeon Brown and Shane Jones.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - where this article was sourced.
That a supposed champion of renewable energy can be so upfront about in-depth consideration of the nuclear option reflects the cold harsh reality that New Zealand electricity generation has just not kept pace with population increases of the last thirty two years.
Because it was in 1992 that the Clyde hydro-electric power station started generating. With an installed capacity of 464 MW and providing around 2100 gigawatt hours (GWh) each year, it’s the third largest power station in the country behind Huntly and Manapouri.
But here’s the thing. We haven’t built a power plant of any sort with a generating capacity of more than 150 MW since Clyde came online. In that time the population’s increased from 3.5 million to 5.2 million.
It’s the story of New Zealand infrastructure in the last three decades. We have more people but we’ve built barely enough schools, roads and hospital beds to keep up, and now the inattention to electricity generation is beginning to hurt us.
Using the simple economic laws of supply and demand and with demand outstripping supply this week, wholesale prices – charged by the generators to the suppliers – have been in excess of $800 a megawatt hour (MWh). That’s 80 cents a kilowatt hour (KWh), the units your household power bill is charged in.
It doesn’t take much to realise that retailers and suppliers cannot keep buying their power at 80 cents a unit and on-selling it at around 30 cents a unit – which is about what most households pay.
Either retail prices are going to increase and increase sharply, or we generate more power for the market to bring prices back to a reasonable level.
The current situation is exacerbated by a perfect weather storm at the moment. The hydro lake levels are low because of a lack of autumn and winter precipitation, and the hydro generators are loath to put too much water through the turbines. Then this mild late winter means not much wind, and there’s been a lot of cloud.
Wind and solar account for less than ten percent of our electricity generation anyway so are not really major players.
What’s hurting is that the backup supply for dry winters in the hydro lakes, the Huntly Power Station, is still having to import coal from Indonesia and is running short of natural gas because the previous Labour Prime Minister said six years ago we couldn’t go looking for anymore.
That decision is now really hurting. We may or may not have found more gas reserves since 2018, but we certainly could have used some of our own coal instead of importing 240,000 tonnes last year, at a probable cost to Genesis Energy of about $30 million. Thankfully last year’s importation was down from the staggering 1,845,000 tonnes brought here in 2021.
Now we’re making plans to import liquid natural gas (LNG) from Australia to keep the gas peakers going at Huntly.
Either way, we are too dependent on a thermal power station to keep the lights on when it doesn’t rain or snow in the South Island.
And that comes back to not continuing to invest in power generation at any scale in the last thirty years.
To be honest wind farms and solar farms are just nipping at the fringes. There is no battery storage for either mode of generation. Solar is useless after dark and a wind farm is no use on a calm day.
Geothermal generation is worthwhile and now accounts for about 18 percent of our power. There are 20 plants around the country but the biggest is still Wairakei, first commissioned in 1958, with an installed capacity of 175 MW and an annual output of 1310 GWh.
There is potential for growth in geothermal but not to the extent of building a power station with the output of either a Manapouri or a Clyde, and certainly not Huntly’s installed capacity of 953 MW.
Hydro power remains the backbone of the industry and we built and built and built during the 20th century from Arapuni in 1924 to Clyde in 1992.
But in 1991 came this thing called the Resource Management Act and up went the stop sign.
The price we’re paying is $800 a MWh.
It’s obvious to Blind Freddy that we need more power generation, and at scale. Tinkering around the edges with solar and wind and geothermal is not investing for the future. We need a big power scheme to reinvigorate generation and to make sure we don’t run out of the stuff when the lakes are low and the gas runs out.
Lake Onslow’s pumped hydro was a plan, but it was a ludicrously expensive one. Other more traditional hydro schemes, which would have been the way forward in a past era, are out of favour too, not least because of the ludicrous legal battles over iwi claims that they somehow have more of a right to water than the rest of us. They don’t, but they have so much money to pay lawyers to argue the point that we’ll all be cold and in the dark before the issue is settled.
There is no future for any country that has to import fuel sources to generate electricity, especially when we have plenty of the stuff ourselves. So we either have to get real about using our own coal and gas reserves, or we have to think seriously, really seriously, about another form of power generation – the nuclear reactor.
It is a political scandal that our country’s leaders have not bothered to advance the discussion - ever - on nuclear power. We were so smugly comfortable with our hydro base we thought we’d never need it.
Well now we do.
It’s actually a very common form of power generation across the developed world. There’re about 440 nuclear power plants around the globe producing about 9 percent of the planet’s electric power, and 22 percent of Europe’s. The 70th anniversary of the first plant, near Moscow in June 1954, has just been marked.
When you watch the woke Olympics in Paris with their uncomfortable cardboard beds and vegan meals for the athletes, remember that France is home to 56 nuclear power stations.
The pushback against nuclear power always includes the names Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Of those three high profile accidents only Chernobyl resulted in an immediate loss of life, and the historically considered aftermath of both Three Mile Island and Fukushima suggests there was negligible long-term impact on those communities either.
But three incidents in 70 years across the nearly 500 nuclear plants that have been built in that time says nuclear power stations are not the humanity threatening beasts many make them out to be.
They also produce a greenhouse gas emissions-free form of electricity and don’t have to worry about the weather. What’s not to like?
An estimated cost of construction nuclear plant suggests it would about half that of Lake Onslow’s $30 billion. Yes, a huge price tag, but it’s called an investment.
The way things work in this country, a nuclear power station is not going to be built in a hurry. But then neither is a hydro dam nor a thermal plant, and geothermal, wind and solar cannot make the sizeable contribution to generation the country so desperately needs.
When an establishment figure like Craig Stobo, with his significant environmental credentials, starts making calls for nuclear power then shouldn’t we stand up and take notice?
And that means you too Christopher Luxon, Simeon Brown and Shane Jones.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - where this article was sourced.
12 comments:
I’ve said it many times on this website. Thermal power generation is the backbone of any modern economy and it ain’t changing.
New modern coal fired power plants are extremely efficient and have minimal emissions compared to a geothermal plant.
Same with Nuclear. But if you listen to uninformed greenies and spineless politicians you will end up in the situation we are in.
They are not Engineers, not one sitting MP has ever done a days work in a power plant.
Coal is here to stay. Get used to it or sit in the dark with the lights off.
That’s the message the government won’t tell you.
The public debate about nuclear power highlights a weakness of democracy: if most voters are ignorant about the issue, they are more susceptible to propaganda which is demonstrably based on simplicisms and falsehoods.
As long as most people think that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb, the public mood will be against nuclear electricity generation.
Until most voters know what an isotope is and know the difference between a chemical reaction and a nuclear reaction and between fission and fusion, there cannot be an intellectually mature public discussion about nuclear power.
Of course the same goes for politicians most of whom are scientifically illiterate.
So what do we replace the democratic decision-making process with, then? In countries that have nuclear power this tends to be done by panels of scientific experts. So we effectively have a technocracy at least with regard to this issue. Perhaps that's not necessarily a bad thing.
A very sobering read Peter Williams. I believe that a nuclear power station would take about ten years to build and we have yet to even have a grownup conversation about it. In the meantime we are facing extraordinary power cost increases and shortly staged blackouts. How past and present Govt’s have failed us by burying their heads in the sand.
I suggest NZ start education and discussion at basic knowledge first. Coal , waste products , and nuclear all use their heat generated to heat water and the steam spins the turbines that makes electricity. the clouds of steam from the cooling towers is NOT smoke and is harmless . It is electricity from water , just like Hydro.
Personally I favour waste to energy plants beside ports and railway that would enable transport of waste easily by container load to the generation plant . A waste to energy plant could be erected as fast as any other plant and without the obvious alarmist battle against nuclear .
A waste to energy plant close to Auckland would assist in both electricity provision and waste removal issues plus Transpower would not be required to take their massive fiscal cut of electricity production because the infrastructure is not needed to be replaced .
Remember a plant that burns car tyres operates in Northland and has environmental rules within the RMA equirements .
Between our politicians on both sides of the house and the corrupt MSM locked into ideological Climate Alarmism, what chance does New Zealand have going forward. We are exporting coal to China, Japan, South Korea and India to drive their industrial power needs while we are stupidly pursuing windmills that were invented in 700-900 AD and solar panels that don’t work at night or cloudy days. Hobbit ville springs to mind.
NZ sourced coal fired generation is the only practical way out of this. Relatively quick and cheap to deploy. Produces local jobs and lots of plant food too!
Peter - not only is Lake Onslow ludicrously expensive, it's ludicrous and would provide neglible benefit to NZ.
Do your nuke power plants stated above include the ship / submarine based ones ?
They are a fine example of how small modular reactors are safe and reliable.
Bring on the shipping container sized reactors for every city or large industry.
It's only a matter of time before the fusion reactors become reality - the sooner the better.
Hopefully the Maori radicals and taniwha will finally see the sense in nukes - oops, forgot that de-colonization could prevent common sense prevailing.
Check out the solar and wind contribution today, virtually nothing.
https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and-market-data/consolidated-live-data
Can you imagine the koha needed by the local iwi to suddenly make a nuclear power plant safe. After the obscene amount demanded by Ngai Tahu for a renewal of consent in the SI, a brand new plant would double the cost.
A look at the 2023 recalibration/update to the 1970's Limits to Growth "Business As Usual" scenario shows that it is highly likely that World Industrial Output has hit the Seneca cliff. The Greens have totally misread "The Limits to Growth" for years now and consider the solution to be a focus on a "Climate Crisis" and the conservation/limiting energy of use, ignoring completely the underpinning growth in populations that demand more. The Jevons paradox has been used to argue that energy conservation is futile, as increased efficiency may increase fuel use. I'd go further and interpret that as "if I don't use it then others will". With this in mind I would humbly suggest that our politicians take a leaf out of the Opposition Parties in Australia and start seriously considering the prospect of diversifying our power generation with the Nuke option along with garnering as much of our conventional sources of energy while we still can. The policies of the last government have left New Zealand extremely vulnerable to shortages in all sources of energy - all based on ideological imperatives. Well we cannot feed or keep people warm with ideology. Leave this too many more years and the oil and gas shortages Worldwide will make it nigh on impossible plus way too late anyway to source the nuke option. It won't be "Goodbye Freddy", it will be "Tough Luck Us". As for the vested interests of iwi over resource consents, they can butt out.
Agree with all you say Peter. We need to get over this ancient non-nuclear stance and act quickly to build nuclear power stations.
David Seymour ACT Leader is a qualified electrical engineer and should be asked to lead NZ towards a reliable electrical energy future . David is one of the few in Parliament who understand electricity and ably supported by Simon Court List MP who is a qualified engineer .
The future process for NZ energy future is simple, electricity production should be near the population and industrial bases , therefore the top of the North Island , rather than dragging power from the South Island .
Reliability is paramount therefore wind and solar can be discarded . Hydro, Coal, Waste and Nuclear are the options . FACT.
Large Hydro should have been instigated if a site was suitable but hasnt so there must not be an obvious site.
Waste to energy is enhanced when using a base of coal and could have a plant starting construction at Marsden Point ( example) without delay .
Huntley should be reconfigured back to modern clean coal technology as the base coal and the transpower infrastructure is available and clean coal combustion is also available .
A Nuclear electricity plant as available on ships from Asia could be moored at a NZ port destination and connected to the national grid whereas it can be towed out to sea if something untoward happens .
NZCPR and interested subcribers have to lead our parliament into intelligent cross party understanding to instigate immediately future electrical infrastructure certainty.
It is a must NZCPR and just ignore the ZERO Carbon etc idiocy.
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