Pee Kay: When Failures became Outages

And who is to blame?

Our wallets took another hit this month as power prices increased by roughly 5%, that, an added painful addition to the 12% increase we experienced in 2025. While most households faced increases between 4% and 12%, we should also spare a thought for Northland households, who are grappling with a 21% price hike while the rest of the country looks for someone to blame!

Naturally, consumers are asking; Why are we being subjected to these relentless price hikes, and who is responsible? Is there a single entity at fault, or is this a systemic failure?

Heather du Plessis-Allan: We allowed the slide to third world electricity supply to happen

Here we go, we might be in for a tough winter again.

Transpower is already warning us that they might have to ask us to turn off our appliances at peak times in the morning and winter on really cold days. Otherwise, they might have to cut power to houses or end up with blackouts for days.

Because we might have a really tight power supply again this winter.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Are we running this country on Blu-Tack and paperclips?

 

Are we running this country on Blu-Tack and paperclips?

We almost had power cuts again this morning and apparently we need to get used to it because this is just the way our winters are going to be from now on.

So what happened was that Transpower issued a grid emergency just before 8am warning that we might not have enough electricity to power the country.

Reporters were on the radio telling people to delay charging laptops and cell phones and consider turning off unnecessary lights.

Viv Forbes: The Green Elephant in the Snowy Mountains

Canberra breeds many white elephants, but now they are breeding a gigantic new breed of pachyderm in Australia’s Snowy Mountains – a Green Elephant. Grandly named “Snowy 2.0 Hydro-Electric”, it has the compulsory green skin, but it is just another big white elephant under a thick layer of green paint.

Snowy 2.0 plans a hugely expensive complex of dams, tunnels, pumps, pipes, generators, roads and powerlines. Water will be pumped up-hill using grid power in times of low demand, and then released when needed to recover some of that energy.

To call it “hydro-electric” is a fraud – it will not store one extra litre of water and will be a net consumer of electric power. It is a giant electric storage battery to be recharged using grid power.