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A power of trouble

Yet again, New Zealand's largest city has been plunged into darkness by a failure in the electricity supply grid.

Aucklanders must be getting used to having their power disappear without notice because, since the great outage of 1998 there have been a number of catastrophic failures that have brought the city to its knees.

Yesterday's outage, which lasted several hours, is attributed to low-hanging lines arcing to bush, which in turn started a fire that caused a total loss of supply through that part of the grid.

Those who were stuck in lifts or faced traffic chaos as they attempted to navigate their way home without the aid of traffic lights probably didn't care why the power was out, they just want to know how long it'll take to get first-world levels of up-time for the city's electrical supply.

That's where climate change may come to their rescue.

NZ is presently at a disadvantage when it comes to the structure of our power supply network.

We have huge generation capacity at one end of the country and huge demand at the other.

In order to connect the two, we've had to build a very long supply network and it's that network that presently seems to be growing increasingly unreliable.

What's more, this concept of remote generation is an old concept that may well soon be consigned to the history books as the demands of the climate-change zealots begin to drive the structure of our energy generation and delivery mechanisms.

Let's face it, even though our southern-power is generated from a largely renewable resource (hydro), the way we use it is inefficient and problematic from both an energy-efficiency and economic perspective.

The present system requires thousands of Kms of hi-voltage cabling and a couple of undersea cables to deliver its valuable energy to the North. That means energy wasted as heat and massive vulnerabilities (as Aucklanders are well aware). It would make a lot more sense to generate power locally -- close to where it's going to be used.

In the case of Auckland, a huge percentage of its daily requirements could be met by the use of low-head tidal power between the two harbours on which the city is built. A significant amount could also be contributed by the planned turbines in the Kaipara harbour.

Regular sea-breezes could also contribute extra power by way of a wall of wind-generators placed in coastal areas to the north and south of the city.

Finally, solar energy could be harnessed, either directly by photovoltaic arrays or by solar-thermal plants that turn the sun's heat into steam to drive generators.

All of these energy technologies are available right now and could be built in a relatively short period of time.

The benefits would be manifold. Vastly improved security of supply, reduced emissions, reduced cost of generation (when compared to the oil/gas-fired thermal stations sometimes used), the injection of money into the economy by way of the construction projects, etc.

Yes, the capital costs would be enormous -- but these aren't "costs" so much as "investments".

Instead of trying to appear to be "greener than green" by leading the world in our willingness to cough up carbon taxes through the Kyoto agreement etc, why don't we just *do* something about our emissions and boost the reliability of Auckland's power supply at the same time?

Of course there is another alternative...

Why not just dump a small nuclear power station at Albany or in South Auckland?

Yes, switching Auckland to locally generated renewable energy looks quite attractive, doesn't it?

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