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The world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.

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It really is time to go solar

26 Jul 2024

There is a glut of solar panels (photovoltaic arrays, PVAs) on the market, apparently.

This has seen to it that prices continue to fall and there's never been a better time to invest in securing at least some level of energy self-sufficiency.

Even if PVAs weren't as cheap as they now are, it's still a good time to fit at least some generation capability and a recent news story hints at why this is the case.

RadioNZ ran this story which is well worth a read.

The statement you should all be paying attention to is this:

'Cooney agreed there had been "chronic underinvestment" in new generation and said that was "coming home to roost"'

Haven't I been saying that for over a decade?

Regular readers are probably sick and tired of my rants that the electricity SOEs have been paying massive dividends to government instead of setting aside capital to be invested in boosting generation capacity?

Why has it taken so long for the industry "experts" to also figure this out?

It is now obvious that we're going to have to invest billions of dollars in building new, sustainable generation capacity and that means hydro, wind and/or solar.

Forget about coal or gas powered generators like the one at Huntly. The skyrocketing cost of fuel combined with our obligations in respect to carbon emissions makes those totally impractical.

So where will those billions of dollars come from?

Well you don't have to be a rocket surgeon to figure that out do you?

Your power bill will go through the roof in order to fund this much-needed increase in generation capablity. It may be through a significant hike in the per-unit cost or it could also be a fixed price levy. Either way, if you're connected to the grid and sucking down KWH you will have to pay a lot more for that privilege.

As well as predicting the situation we currently find ourselves in, I'm also predicting that the need for that extra capacity will be far more urgent than it presently appears to be -- thanks to the surge in EV ownership and use.

We'll hear all the usual excuses from those who are paid huge sums to manage these resources -- such as "nobody could have predicted the dramatic increase in demand caused by such a rapid transition to EVs".

Yeah, right!

So if you have money to spare, there's no better time to invest in a bunch of PVAs and perhaps even a decent sized battery so you can cut the cable and avoid this huge extra burden that must be imposed in order to make up for the greed of previous governments as they dipped into the SOEs' expansion capital to pay those dividends.

Unless... instead of building centralised generators, the NZ government grows a clue and instead offers to heavily subsidise solar generation at a domestic and commercial level. They could, as other governments overseas have done, provide subsidies for the installation of PVAs on houses and commercial buildings so as to dramatically reduce the load on existing generators. This would leave more water in the lakes for peak time use and significantly reduce the need to build new dams or wind generators.

Of course the *really* sensible move would have been to say "no" to Rio Tinto and, instead of virtually giving away the capacity of an entire hydro scheme for pennies, add that power to the grid for everyone to use. However, I suspect there were far too many boozy lunches involved for influencers and decision-makers for that to ever be a starter.

Carpe Diem folks!

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