The Mike Hosking Breakfast Mike's Minute: Why are we only now thinking of new energy ideas?
It's only the start of Wednesday so let's be honest we've only had two days of news, and we already have two stories around power.
The first was Transpower saying we need to find more avenues of power generation and we need to do that quickly, because until all the promised transition stuff comes online, we are going to be short of capacity.
No kidding.
They said we have a lot of promises on renewables, but the delivery isn't happening all that quickly.
No kidding.
The second was Genesis saying they are looking at what they call a fast-start generation plant at Huntly.
Hasn’t Huntly become quite the “thing”? A while back Huntly was the ugly girlfriend of the power generation family.
Poor, old, ugly, fat Huntly. That was when promises around wind and sun were flying and the future was renewable, and we would all save the planet.
What a gargantuan cock-up that turned out to be. Now for at least the third winter in a row the industry is falling over itself to tell us what's not right, what's not delivered and drumming up new ideas that, dare I suggest, should have been drummed up a long time ago.
As regards Huntly gas and coal, could I ask why is it now that they are dreaming up these ideas?
The coal pile, by the way, has never been larger, but gas and coal take 12 hours to get going. In short, fast start, it says what it does, and you turn it on like a light.
Can I ask why is it now that all the power companies are cooperating around Huntly to keep it going for years to come?
Why is it we wait until we are broken to actually find a few solutions?
When Jacinda made her captain's call to kill the gas industry, why did no one in power go “hold on, we aren't ready"?
Why are so few proactive? Why is so little preventative planning done?
Why do we have winters of angst around rainfall and businesses cutting production and Methanex selling their power to others?
Why is it we wait until we don’t have it to think of what to do about getting it back?
NZ Inc, eh? Very 1986.
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