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Explain me this (NZ's electricity budget)

It's winter and as is normal for winter in New Zealand, the electricity industry has already issued warnings of potential power shortages on cold winter mornings.

Apparently, every time a cold blast sweeps up the country, the security of our energy supply teeters on a knife-edge. The failure of a single switch, transformer or generator could see widespread outages plunge households and businesses into darkness.

As a nation that prides itself on being clean and green with a very high percentage of its energy generated from renewables, what's going on?

Well it's those intermittent renewables that are the problem.

Unfortunately for us, the most rapidly growing elements of our energy generation infrastructure are solar and wind. These are certainly clean and green but they also have the unfortunate characteristic of generating the least power at times when demand is highest.

Just before sunrise on a cold frosty morning in mid-winter New Zealand, solar output will be zero, as will wind generation.

This means that the heavy lifting has to be done by hydro, geothermal and fossil-fueled generators because these will generate energy regardless of the weather or time of day.

Our desire to clean up NZ's electricity generation sector has meant that we don't have a lot of fossil fuel generation capacity and it's unlikely we'll commission a whole lot of new capacity because of the carbon footprint it creates.

As for hydro, well again, environmental concerns seem to have pretty much completely halted the construction of new dams and attached generation capacity.

This all means that when the wind is blowing, the sun is shining and we get useful amounts of rainfall, our energy network is in good order. We have plenty of excess capacity and a failure of any single component won't cause a catastrophic domino effect.

However, on those cold winter mornings, things are a whole lot different and aside from plans to build an LNG-powered generator fueled by expensive natural gas imports, we haven't really got much in the way of mitigation planned for this vulnerability.

With this in mind, who are the idiots proposing that we build an AI datacentre in the South Island?

As I've mentioned in previous columns, datacentres require a very reliable energy supply, not one that may get the flick when Mrs Smith turns on her heater at 7am on a frosty August morning and adds that final 1.5KW of load that finally breaks an already overloaded network.

Sure, these datacentres have their own generators and batteries to protect against such outages but they come with a huge cost. Those generators are fossil-fueled and therefore start belching large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, as well as creating quite a racket for anyone within earshot. It would also not surprise me if there wasn't some kind of penalty payable by the energy provider if they have more than a predetermined amount of downtime.

What's the answer?

Well instead of building more fossil-fueled generation, I believe (as I've said many times in this colum before), we need to promote the uptake of EVs that have the abililty to feed back into the grid at peak times.

If you've got an EV in the garage which has been charged to 100 percent overnight then having it chuck 10KWH back into the grid on that cold frosty morning will massively reduce the load on the grid -- effectively eliminating the need to commission more generation capacity for many, many years.

Even better, promote the uptake of domestic and commercial solar generation and during summer we won't need to draw down nearly as much of our hydro reserves, helping mitigate the damaging effects that an unusually prolonged period of drought can currently inflict.

Sadly, I see no sign of such forward-thinking strategy from any of our political parties.

Idiots.

Carpe Diem folks!

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