Mike's Minute: Some good energy news for winter, for once

Christmas came early for Tiwai Aluminium Smelter. 

They get to do business. In fact, they get to do business in a country where you would have thought doing business is to be encouraged. 

They have been prevented from doing all the business they can because they have a deal with their power company, Meridian, whereby they have to contain themselves if things are a bit tight in the old power department. 

It is indeed a weird, old world where we revel in ideas like AI and crypto and data centres, and yet we don’t have the slightest idea where the power to make it all work is coming from. 

Big tech is under pressure globally. It is claimed they have data centres running and using things like water in areas of the planet where water is scarce. 

New Zealand wants to be a data centre hub, and yet we can't allow an aluminium plant to run to its capacity because it didn’t rain enough. 

The good news is it has rained a bit lately so the southern lakes look solid, which means, they think, we might not be as pinched as we have been in other winters. 

The idea that you aspire to run a power grid that is reliant on things you have no control over is a very modern version of insanity. 

We need it to rain, we need it to blow, and we need the sun to shine. We have no control over any of these things so we convince ourselves we aren't idiots by thinking we will build options. 

So if the sun isn't out, the wind will be. Or if it doesn’t blow, at least it will rain. 

But when it doesn’t do any of those things, which it hasn’t, we need Tiwai and your average punter to take it easy on the cold mornings. 

And that's with, right here, right now, hardly any AI, crypto not really being a thing here, and data centres at a minimum. Imagine how stuck we would be if we had actually got any of these things up and running? 

Gas would help. But Labour stopped all that and our re-opening of the market is only just beginning. We really do look very 1987. 

In the meantime, the coal comes in from Indonesia, defeating the entire purpose of the climate exercise of renewables. 

Cart before horse, anyone? 

They say it will all work out, eventually. We will have so much renewable capacity, and we will have all bases covered, apparently. Do you believe that? 

Do you believe a country that makes its biggest power user limit its capacity every time winter comes around, really is a country that deals successfully in big picture thinking? 

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