Richard Meade: An attempt to lower NZ electricity prices could end up doing the opposite – here’s why

In its quest to lower electricity prices for New Zealand households, the Electricity Authority may inadvertently make the situation worse.

This week, the authority announced plans to require New Zealand’s “gentailers” – firms that both generate electricity and retail it to consumers – to offer the same supply terms to independent retailers as they do to their own retail arms.

Bryan Leyland: The wind and solar power need storage

The New Zealand government along with many others in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon by 2050. They seem to believe that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led many governments to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar. New Zealand promotes them but does not offer direct subsidies.

These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some low cost large scale technology that will store surplus electricity.

In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its installed capacity for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. About 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to generate as much energy as a 1000 MW geothermal power station: and in fact, as we shall see, we will still need conventional power stations or low cost energy storage once large scale wind and solar are online.