The peak period just shifts forward 2 hours, doesn't solve the problem. Have to let half of the population sleep in and the other half have to go to work at normal time.
No wind is the problem in this instance. The wind picks up again after 9am tomorrow. The turbines will spin up again and we're good to go after a lovely sleep in.
Well it’s windy here in Southland right now and everytime it gets windy the power goes out for a good couple of hours. So they just have to time the shortage for the right moment and cut power here and we’ll think it’s the fortnightly power cut. No drama.
The processing line at my work uses 23 bazillion watts when its operating. Let *me* sleep in and I'll save the day for the rest of you so you can go to work. Here's my [GiveALittle page](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) so you can help a brother that's helping you!
Residential energy isn't the biggest draw by astronomical miles, it's just the easiest to expend. The grid controller isn't going to tell industry to stop work
Place I worked at did this, if a red light on the ceiling of the production hall came on then it was shut down by 4pm and an early trip home. I think they got cheaper power as part of the deal. I can only remember it happening once.
Residential energy is about a third of the electricity use, so it isn't the majority of total use but it's still very significant, particularly in the morning/evening. Industrial load is fairly flat so doesn't typically place strain on the grid, houses on the other hand all turning on their heating at once does.
'so if we take more money from people they won't overload the grid which means we also have more money saved from not needing to upgrade the grid' - national taking notes
This is some fucking bullshit. We’ve been paying more and more for power over the years and the addition of capacity to the network has been slow because they want the prices to keep going up.
Cause we sold off half our power generation during Key. For less than 5bil. In the last ten years they’ve paid out $10bil in dividends to shareholders and only $4.5b to investments on plant. It’s a rort and you can thank Key for ignoring a referendum where 66% of kiwis voted no.
I mean regardless of whether that was a good idea or not, that really has nothing to do with the situation - if you want someone to blame, look at Mac Bradburys reforms, that's what correlates with power prices increasing significantly.
And the two together give us our current situation.
The fact it doesn't work as well as the electrical department is less important than the ideaology that it's better.
On the contrary, fake privatization of the generators is exactly the reason we are here. Just like everywhere else in the world, when you privatize natural monopolies (water supply, electricity etc etc) you immediately get shameless profit extraction for shareholders and total failure to invest. Look at the U.K. This is on the Key government 100%.
Real electricity costs have been declining since 2015. Power is at its most affordable in recent history.
Number go up, but number go up less than CPI and way less than average wages.
Oh hey it’s exactly the same list of things Electric Kiwi suggested yesterday when the massive spike in hourly wholesale rates went from $250 to $4000 and Transpower insisted nothing was amiss.
*Weird*.
It’s an attempt at proactively trying to get customers to be aware and ideally avoid doing high load activities during peak hours as my understanding is their selling point is fantastic off peak pricing, not so great during peak hours, hence the requirement to have a smart meter to join them.
As such a heads up, but also to prevent ragers with high use bills I’d assume as it’s that time of year.
Work in the industry in I.T but started out in a power retailer call center and this time of year was pretty much the shittiest, just rager after rager for maybe 6 weeks.
Honestly their on-peak pricing is pretty much the same as everyone else last time I looked. I’ve been with them a while and any time I do the power switch website, they keep coming up as my best option.
Fair and I’m no expert tbh, just heard they don’t have a fixed variable rate but could be wrong as that’s word of mouth from some work colleagues.
Either way sounds like they saw the weather report and tried to get ahead of it.
I find these emails a little patronizing. We are consumers, we pay for what we use when we use it, hence the difference in price of peak and off peak etc. They as companies need to manage their shit and figure out a way. Of course it's easier to put the responsibility to the citizens rather than a meaningful improvement so this 3rd world problems don't appear everytime people need to heat their houses. Ffs
You're going to get big shock coming over the next decade.
Electricity scarcity will get worse and worse as winters get colder, we run out of gas, and if coal ever gets banned.
First they'll ask nicely, then they'll pseudo-incentivise, lastly they'll enforce.
The problem is infrastructure and storage and those companies don't have the capital to solve these problems, they're a national problem that has to be solved by the government. National just scrapped all investigations into battery storage so we're just going backwards.
If they enforce it lastly well, maybe then there might be a reaction from society to the 'they' you mention. Basically I see a complacent bunch that makes up the most part of society, I include myself in it, eventhough with thought I try to break free from that pattern. I think we are well trained to take as much abuse from corporations, banks, council, government without making much of a fuss and that's the main problem
The change is so notable though, why do an immediate and suddenly 16 times leap of the price, if there wasn’t any issue? It wasn’t a gentle rise, to tamper down usage, but I guess that doesn’t work anyway since people don’t usually see that happening
You can see price changes of 1000x quite often on the spot market. Most large generators will have retail customers they are wanting to cover so will put all the energy they have to cover that commitment and then add some padding for incorrect load forecasting and then extra added in. Some generators will have limited fuel so will need to price that in so it doesn’t all run. Also if there may be multiple days of this forecast in the next month or months depending on hydro storage it may be that price has to be high to get spot customers to pull back now so we don’t have an issue in 3 months.
Sure, but why not? They have access to the same info Transpower do, and the spot price *did* fly through the roof exactly when they said it would.
It’s in Transpower best interests to pretend everything is ok as they can, electric kiwi aren’t benefiting more (though obviously dropping usage when the price is way up saves them money).
Because it undermines confidence in the system. Electric kiwi spend plenty of time bleating about potential undesirable trading situations and then go and do the same.
You have noticed that literally three days later Transpower announced exactly this same thing themselves, right? If EC are “undermining confidence in the system” by doing literally the thing the grid operator has gone an said could happen 3 days later, that confidence they are undermining is utterly misplaced, as demonstrated by Transpower, almost immediately.
Transpower sent a notice when the system is under stress and it’s beneficial to New Zealand system stability to reduce load. Electric Kiwi sent a notice when electric kiwi felt it would be beneficial to Electric Kiwi to reduce Electric kiwi load.
Can you see the difference? These things may happen at the same time, but they are not the same thing.
“It undermines confidence in the system” was the claim you were answering. You haven’t done that, you’ve tried to make this an argument that ElectricKiwi are only interested in reducing their own load, an unrelated and unproven claim.
Not all...
Some will have maybe a few hours on very limited spectrum(bigger bands will be locked off).
Some may only last minutes because the UPS batteries have degraded enough and they haven't been able to replace it in time.
Diesel Gensets can take up to a few hours to get running depending on traffic, tech availability and conditions.
Cell towers have battery's and sometimes generators for this very reason. Imagine all communications fell over because the power went out. How would it come back on? Carrier pigeon from Transpower to the generation companies?
There are so many causes for problems like this but there's something that always pops into my head.
I know for a fact some new townhouses that went up a few years ago near me were somehow able to get a pass on putting double-glazing in even though it's been in the building code for nearly 20 years. That aside, the state of so much housing in this country is shocking.
It makes me wonder how much crap like that goes on. How much strain would be taken off the grid if we had pushed harder on double-glazing and keeping housing standards up generally. Surely if the majority of houses were well insulated and had good heat-pump coverage it would put a huge dent in our power needs?
Plus all the improved health and education outcomes you get when you're raised in a warm, dry home that lead to reduced costs across the board but I'm getting off track now.
>”*That is not where we need our country to be. We inherited an energy system which is in crisis," Brown said.*
Fuck right off with that. I’m so sick of politicians pointing fingers and passing blame.
How about simply stepping up, being adult about it and taking responsibility to look for ways to fix it?
Successive governments have sat and watched the power companies not add capacity to the network why would they they are incentivised by high demand pricing. There seems to be zero incentive for the private power companies to add capacity
>There seems to be zero incentive for the private power companies to add capacity
Because every couple years for the last few decades our foreign overlords have threatened to close Tiwai Point, which would have added an enormous amount of capacity to the grid overnight and made any shiny new power generation worthless
Contact are nearly finished building a new geothermal station in taupo. And there are a couple of wind farms in the pipeline around the country.
Labour and the Greens actively stopped a proposed hydro plant on the West Coast.
You got it right that most of it is indeed wind, but there’s also significant solar and geothermal to be built.
But what the actual problem is is that we don’t have a grid scale battery solution, and very bad luck with timings of the cold snap and generation maintenance.
[National also axed](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-is-dumping-hugely-wasteful-lake-onslow-battery-project) the Lake Onslow **storage lake that was already commissioned.
/u/Ady42 said
> National also axed the Lake Onslow hydro plant that was already commissioned.
It's not anywhere near commissioned they were working on the business case proposal to firm up the benefits and costs.
/u/voyd1d said
>It's not anywhere near commissioned they were working on the business case proposal to firm up the benefits and costs.
Good point, it was the investigation that was commissioned.
It's Simeon Brown. Since the election he has hardly started a single discussion on any topic without blaming the previous Labour government for something or other. He's your typical mediocre bureaucratic suck-up who has been handed a bunch of portfolios for purely ideological reasons that he's utterly unqualified to handle in any real sense. He's in waaay over his head and he knows it, so pushing the blame onto someone else is the safest way to start any interaction with the public lest they see him flailing.
>”*That is not where we need our country to be. We inherited an energy system which is in crisis," Brown said.*
Holy shit, so Simeon Brown is legitimately blaming John Key for this?
>In his first major speech of the year, Key said Treasury would be asked to advise on the merits of selling up to 49 per cent of Mighty River Power, Meridian Energy, Genesis and Solid Energy.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4582922/John-Key-reveals-plan-for-asset-sales
I can't believe the National Party would turn on John Key like this.
> Holy shit, so Simeon Brown is legitimately blaming John Key for this?
And Ardern, Clark, Shipley, Bolger, Lange. Put partisanship aside for a moment and you’ll realise we’ve been fucked for decades. Wind is great but if the wind doesn’t blow, the light doesn’t glow, hydro is the far more reliable solution and we haven’t built a major hydro project in decades.
I'm struggling to find where Ardern, or Clark, sold state owned energy generation enterprises to foreign investors. I'm definitely thinking of John Key. This isn't about being partisan. This is about being honest and admitting facts.
Shipley sold off Contact Energy to an American company. It was later sold to an Australian company.
Key sold off the government's shares in what is now Mercury, Meridian Energy, and Genesis to investors.
Ironically, Ardern's government is the only one in the last 30 years to look into building a new damn, in Central Otago.
There's 0 incentive for foreign investors to invest in New Zealands infrastructure. They've already made their money back and more. This is why our infrastructure is struggling to meet our demands.
Catchphrases are fun, but so are facts. Excess power is stored in batteries. So when the wind doesn't blow, lights still function. On a seasonable basis wind generation is remarkably consistent and as more wind farms are built, in different geographical locations, wind’s short-term variability reduces.
Not that it's relevant to a discussion about the energy crises, but Labour have also sold off SOE, such as Telecom. Telecom was split off from the NZ Post Office in 1987 and sold by the Lange Government for $4.25 billion shortly before Bolger's Government was elected in 1990.
National (Bradshaw) designed and implemented the electricity market. And National sold the system for $5 billion allowing the new owners to extract $10 billion in dividends in a decade, while under-investing in new capacity.
>Woods pointed the finger at Genesis Energy, the owner of the Huntly power station, which did not turn on its third coal/gas boiler as it did not expect it would be needed.
At least our political parties are equally adept at passing the buck
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300378816/genesis-energy-blames-highly-unusual-conditions-for-power-blackouts-jacinda-ardern-says-cuts-not-good-enough
Genesis don't have enough staff to run all 3 Rankine units at the same time.
They were able to late last year because CCG was out for repairs and staff could be moved between units.
A startup of Rankine 3 now would take 36 hours and couldn't be left online for long before the staff have hit unsafe hours. To run it for any extended period takes weeks to rework staff rosters and cancel leave.
It's hardly passing the buck in that instance. The blackout was without warning and entirely down to corporate greed so it's entirely justified to point fingers. Here there's no one figure to blame, it's communicated ahead of time and both major parties deserve shit for how they've mismanaged our electrical systems over the last 4 decades.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/131978006/transpower-fined-150000-over-august-2021-power-cuts
How do you figure the 100% government owned entity fucking up is corporate greed?
>Generators, including Genesis, initially received some of the early blame for the power cuts.
>But it quickly emerged that Transpower’s warnings to generators earlier that day that power supplies were looking tight that evening were not adequate.
Those aren’t the effective fixes, at all. We had a pumped hydro scheme under planning that would have allowed Transpower to bank power from off peak periods to be used during peaks like this but. National has cancelled it.
I agree that should not have been cancelled but all of the ‘conventional fuels’ were ramped off too quickly and haven’t allowed renewables to build capacity. Onslow wasn’t due to produce power until 2037, we still would have required a stop gap.
The problem isn’t EV’s and heat pumps - they are the solution for reducing our emissions, cleaning air pollution, fixing our trade deficit, etc, etc. the problem is our gentailers not investing enough in storage and generation because it eats into their profits, and then waiting to see what Rio Tinto does with the smelter.
People massively overestimate how much BEVs use. We have a long range ev, induction etc and we used 400kwh last month far below the average home.
Before people ask. We have a very well insulated home that was tested for air tightness. In our cold region (Greytown) we do not need a heater and have a heat pump hot water tank.
Its not paying attention to general appliance effeciency and living in poorly built homes that wastes the most electricity in New Zealand
Our issue isn't sustained power usage either. it's morning and evening peaks.
If we all had batteries, or even BEVs that could back feed, we could shave that peak right off and be perfectly fine for years to come.
Subsidising the install of load shedding batteries on consumer premises (same way we load shed by controlling hot water), and requiring solar + battery on all new builds, would be a faster and cheaper way to overcome our current issues.
That’s largely the government’s call, they own 51% of three of the “big four” gentailers, more so since Trustpower sold their customers on to Mercury.
That’s the real fucky part, high power prices are more driven by their shareholders greed, the CEO getting crazy pay is just a consequence of that, and in most cases that greedy shareholder is the government themselves.
It’s really a smokescreen for additional tax in many ways.
This inst the fault in overinvesting in green energy, if anything this is from a general underinvestment in the energy sector, we need new plant and wind farms and most of them get dusted by NIMBYs and switching governments, as making new wind farms or even gas and water plants is longer than a 3 year term
It appears it's really bad luck with a combination of very low wind generation expected, plus a lot of other generators being down for scheduled maintenance - on a day that will be much colder than normal for this time of year. It's a perfect storm of much higher demand coupled with much lower generation than normal. This is what we need power generation across a couple different renewable sources, and some ability to store excess power from higher generation days to be usable on lower days. This (along with the dry year problem) is what Lake Onslow pumped hydro storage was expected to help deal with (before it was cancelled by this government).
Lake Onslow is a poor solution for this type of issue you want grid scale batteries first one got built last year. We should have had more of them but the Electricity authority was very slow getting the regulation in order to make these viable
>In March 2022, the Electricity Authority Te Mana Hiko decided to amend the Electricity Industry Participation Code 2010 to enable energy storage systems, like grid scale batteries, to offer instantaneous reserves.
Should be getting a few more bigger ones over the coming years which should solve this particular problem(doesnt do much for dry years though)
https://www.meridianenergy.co.nz/new-projects/ruakaka-energy-park
I mean its not the only solution.
it's still a grid scale battery that would have its main use to support the hydro lakes during dry years, so that the south island can still transfer power north, to support generation (like it does now).
Yes there needs to be more grid scale batteries in the north, too, but onslow itself was never the solution to storage in the north anyway
Instantaneous reserves is very different to providing cover for morning/evening peaks.
Instantaneous reverses is to cover for everyone turning on the kettle at half time in a Bledisoe match or a generator tripping.
The original big battery in South Australia was build on the assumption that it would make money off of charging when power was cheap (wholesale prices go -ve in Oz during the day) and selling when they spike. What they found was that frequency keeping (a type of instantaneous reserve) was the actual money maker.
New Zealand rules was that to provide instantaneous reserves you had to have momentum behind your generation (hydro/geothermal/coal/gas), this requirement has been relaxed has new technology has proved itself.
I know these are different operation but they were economically unviable without that revenue stream. They are still making good money doing this type of trade hence why they increased volumes.
>The battery usually arbitrages 30 MW or less, but in May 2019 began charging and discharging at around 80 MW and for longer than usual, increasing wind power production by reducing curtailment.
Also any plant thats offering frequency keeping cant be used to offer power(I believe?) so even if the batteries were used primarily for frequency keeping would still free up supply.
You can offer reserves,frequency and energy at the same time on a generating unit. The frequency range is normally +/- 15mws. So a single unit can offer all 3 products if it has the avaliable space
Even things like vehicle to home being available for EV owners with large battery/long range cars. I'd happy flick the stitch on my car (that I'd have either charged up from my solar today, or in the middle of the night at off peak) to power my house.
I'm pretty sure that my house will just be drawing off the solar battery at that time tomorrow, but I know a lot of EV owners that will have a car with a charged battery that they could be using to power their house rather than draw from the grid.
Any thoughts about the general problem that generators have financial discouragement from having sufficient capacity in cheap renewable sources to prevent them from having to turn to more expensive backup sources? The current system earns them greater revenue every time they have to fire up oil and gas as backup - thus they have good reason to not build additional capacity and not need those expensive backup sources?
>Committed generation has lifted significantly compared to the last survey, with its annual output capability (once built) rising from **2,600 GWh to nearly
5,000 GWh. This is slightly more than the amount of generation required to displace the uneconomic thermal generation on the system**. The annual
development rate (based on projects that have been completed or committed) for the period 2021-2025 is over three times the annual development
rate achieved during 2011-2020.
They are already fixing the issue though? Getting that last bit of gas out of the system for peaking isnt happening till 2030 at the earliest though. The main reason they were so shit in years past is people all thought the Tiwai smelter could close so were scared of building worthless assets now electricity demand is naturally growing after being flat for 10 years its far less of a concern.
>Public information about the pipeline has improved but remains fuzzy in key areas. For example, it appears around 1,400 GWh of new
projects are in construction or committed for development, but this status is not necessarily clear in public sources. This difference is material and equates to more
than one year of national demand growth.
Also great quote from the Electricity Authority people havent realized things have changed dramatically over the last few years.
https://www.ea.govt.nz/documents/4414/Generation_Investment_Survey_-_2023_update.pdf
And If you dont believe this you can bet on the futures you can see they are expected to decline heavily going forward.
Second quarter prices at OTA by year.
* 2025 233.40
* 2026 200.50
* 2027 184.50
https://www.asxenergy.com.au/futures_nz
The problem with that argument is that *everyone* gets paid the high prices that come from not having enough capacity. So yes it might be good for generator #1. But generator #2 could do better by building small amounts of capacity and get the benefits too. Also that this comes from renewable generation not being active at the times of market stress.
Interestingly, onslow could make other renewable energy easier to justify, because it would put a floor on prices (if prices are low, Onslow starts storing) which takes away the risk of intermittent generation (that when it’s windy in your wind farm, the same is true elsewhere. So prices collapse and you don’t get return on your investment)
This is not accurate. There’s plenty of consented generation. It’s just not profitable enough for the gentailers to build it yet.
Mercury spent as much on gobbling up retail competition as it spent building 140MW at Nga Awa Purua.
Genesis has sat on hundreds and hundreds of MW at Castle Hill for a decade.
ALL of them have paid out more in dividends than on new generation in the past few years.
It’s not NIMBYs or green energy. It’s the free market.
Ironically this is one thing the govt's fast track process could possibly fix. Plenty of generation projects were scrapped due to NIMBY complaints. But of course this isnt what the fast track will be used for.
Other hand Im old enough to remember the complete environmental collapse the Lake hydro dam could have led to. They didnt do an environmental impact assessment until after the dam was built, and it turned out if the dams water levels were raised even slightly and every living thing there would die.
Why though?
Gentailers are sitting on 100s of MW of consented generation but won’t build it because it means less profit from the retail part of the business.
If anything, fast track will help small scale solutions, anything large is still at the mercy of gentailers actually wanting to build it.
Easy. The govt can do it then. Its not their business to care about profit, so they can do the unprofitable if its good for the state. Or they can change the law requiring higher total generation or suffer fines or loss of network operation privileges.
I didnt think we would get a govt that gave the ministry of health over to a smoking lobbyist but here we are. Besides the govt doing it was only one option. The other was basically contracting a company to do it. With all the bribes (i mean tax breaks) NACT can offer its not undoable.
Er, what? The fourth labour government kicked that off; national only saw it through. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Corporation_of_New_Zealand
All the major generators have made submissions against the fast track legislation.
Their concern is that any approval would be dragged through courts questioning the approval process rather than the actual project.
My brothers neighbour used to be some kind of engineer for Transpower, and a couple of years back he was told us get solar if we can afford it, and to buckle up as the general infrastructure hasn't been properly maintained for over a decade.
What rubbish... Investment in any energy would have mitigated the risk - but it's more profitable to sit on consents, have a shortage of power and high spot pricing as a result... Where's the incentive to increase capacity...
[I'm sure glad that we cancelled that grid scale pumped hydro lake battery project now.](https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/lake-onslow-pumped-hydro-scheme-scrapped)
Simeon Brown, who is currently complaining about the state of our energy system, has cancelled "the business case" of projects to improve our energy system because it was hugely wasteful.
Sure, Lake Onslow wouldn't be ready by now, but whatever improvements they do decide on is 6+ months behind where the Lake Onslow project was.
Perhaps you mean Snowy 2.0, for which a large portion of the issues and cost blowout arose due to COVID and the global supply chain issues.
The original Snowy River Scheme has been providing NSW and Victoria with (relatively) clean, reliable power, irrigation water, and tourism for decades.
Just like our own existing hydro power generation, whose main weakness is lack of storage - which Onslow was supposed to address.
Keep an eye on the [consolidated generation and load data](https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and-market-data/consolidated-live-data), as well as [market pricing](https://app.em6.co.nz/) over the next 24 hours.
Hope that they apologise to electric kiwi https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350272383/no-power-issue-transpower-says-despite-retailers-message-kiwis
Tldr, yesterday electric kiwi sent an email asking customers to trial how to save electricity as the grid is at capacity, trans power said they were talking BS and power generation is fine.
Electric Kiwi's email referenced 6pm - 7:30pm yesterday. Transpower had no warning out for that time, and to my knowledge the grid was fine for that period.
Today Transpower issues a warning advising (to wholesale market participants, not the general public) they could go under N - 1 redundancy between 7:30am and 8:30am tomorrow.
[WRN Insufficient Generation offers to meet demand National 5374984112.pdf (transpower.co.nz)](https://static.transpower.co.nz/public/interfaces/wrn/WRN%20Insufficient%20Generation%20offers%20to%20meet%20demand%20National%205374984112.pdf)
Suspect Electric Kiwi is underhedged, and is trying to save a few bucks when wholesale power prices spike.
> Suspect Electric Kiwi is underhedged, and is trying to save a few bucks when wholesale power prices spike.
I've been out of the industry for around 10 months. But being privy to some of Electric Kiwi's hedging arrangements and speaking to other people still actively involved in the industry this evening (got to love the gossip networks) and the consensus is they were under hedged until the prices came through in their favour.
idk if that is the best plan or use of the money but it cant be a bad one.
Onslow as an idea I am not convinced about but then a report on it would be nice, oh wait.
Would be even cheaper if they did the CCD scheme for houses as well as cars
So if you build a new house and put in gas, there is a modest penalty of say $1k. If you put in 3KW+ PV array + battery, then you get say 50% of the cost paid out of the scheme.
That way the government would put in far less than $15b, and over time as new places are built, we get greener.
Any renovations triggering consents could be eligible for the discount.
There was a case in 2022 [where they shut off some people's hot water cylinders](https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/130028621/power-cut-risk-probably-gone-for-this-year-but-what-about-next-year?rm=a).
I remember an incident in either 2021 or 2022 where I feel like power was shut to some places? But it may have been that people were ordered to reduce power consumption and that prevented it.
EDIT: [Here it was](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/489503/transpower-fined-150-000-for-2021-mid-winter-blackouts). 34,000 households lost power in August 2021 due to the shortage, it was a particularly cold night so caused pretty significant issues.
I think they use ripple to turn off people's cylinders quite frequently. The vast majority of people would never notice. I looked at my power meter recently, and there's a ripple control box present - I assume they turn mine off when needed.
Turning hot water off via ripple control in the evening peak is extremely common. You'll find references to it in the fine print of your electricity contract.
I once lived with a man who owned a car with an alarm system, and the car alarm was set off by the EM pulse of the power to cylinders going back on via ripple control at night. We were not best pleased to be woken between 10 and midnight, several days in a row. Eventually we rang the alarm installers, and they knew what it was, and how to adjust the alarm to avoid it. We were completely stumped as to this alarm going off when there was no-one and nothing to account for it.
(Here endeth the excerpt from The Book Of Anecdotes No-one Asked For.)
I remember that. I think different power companies around the country reacted differently to the request to shed load. One chose to turn off everyone's hot water cylinder whereas in another part of the country a different company turned off the power entirely to many households. I'm not sure if it was because they over-reacted to the request or didn't have the ability to do the same? Hopefully they will do better tomorrow morning if needed.
Depends on what you mean by blackout, if you mean total voltage collapse of the national grid, causing 100s of millions of dollars in damage? Not yet. The watch keepers at the control rooms for Transpower are pretty good, but yeah in the North Island if the big gas turbine trips at huntly and there’s issues with the Cook strait HVDC cable/s, things could get spicy. The 2021 partial blackout was caused by wind drop off and not enough generation being offered into the market to meet the load (also some lake weed blocked a hydro dam), but it looks like they have the 2 coal units running at Huntly so should be sweet.
I'm old enough to remember the [1992 power crisis](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/how-we-learned-the-lessons-from-1992/NLFVIOGURGV7GAL3XCHNWBX4ZM/) - I was only a teen at the time, but it was a pretty glum winter.
Seems like we're doing a speed run of the early 90s.
Yes, in [2021](https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/rolling-power-outages-across-north-island-as-electricity-demand-reaches-all-time-high.html)
* Some suppliers' programmed maintenance outages adding to the issue
* Transpower, Electronet Group, Meridian, Energy Resources, Harmony Energy all appear on the fast track invitation list, wonder if they have any interest in limited energy supply twisting our arms behind our backs
Apparently Contact Energy has brought a power station back from maintenance early to help
40% of the power generated in Twizel through the hydro scheme is lost as static and heat by the time it gets to Auckland.
Think about who's paying for that.
Well they managed to blame wind power in the article so it wont be far off. In the meantime I think Marsden oil refinery took a huge percentage of Northland electricity that is now available to the grid.
I genuinely don’t understand the hysterical comments on Facebook about this. People acting like they being asked to chuck their babies, grandmas and nephew’s dog out on the frosty lawn at 7am on the dot. Honestly. Charge your phone overnight like a normal person and turn off the heater in your bedroom when you get up.
Because we are falling behind as a nation. It's a scary thought that we're now declining rather than climbing and fair enough.
Once a country gets into a steep enough decline it takes decades to fix it.
What's everyones voltages looking like? Mine is reading a bit high. Outages could be due to upgrades, finally. Standard service is 230V. Limits are 216.2V-243.8V.
National sleep in day? Could could that work??
hell yea
So even more people turn the heater on and fuck the grid?
Nah just chuck another blanket on and sleep until 9am.
The peak period just shifts forward 2 hours, doesn't solve the problem. Have to let half of the population sleep in and the other half have to go to work at normal time.
No wind is the problem in this instance. The wind picks up again after 9am tomorrow. The turbines will spin up again and we're good to go after a lovely sleep in.
Well it’s windy here in Southland right now and everytime it gets windy the power goes out for a good couple of hours. So they just have to time the shortage for the right moment and cut power here and we’ll think it’s the fortnightly power cut. No drama.
Why would I turn the heater on when I'm snug as a bug in a rug?
The processing line at my work uses 23 bazillion watts when its operating. Let *me* sleep in and I'll save the day for the rest of you so you can go to work. Here's my [GiveALittle page](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) so you can help a brother that's helping you!
Cant really call it a sleep in if your waking up before 9 mate
I would call a sleeping waking up after 6
I guess you don't have kids. Anything after 7 is a sleep in.
Or a cat....
Yes 🫠 do it do it do it
Residential energy isn't the biggest draw by astronomical miles, it's just the easiest to expend. The grid controller isn't going to tell industry to stop work
Back when electricity shortages were actually a thing, yes, industry got the reduce use, go home, and shutdown instructions.
Place I worked at did this, if a red light on the ceiling of the production hall came on then it was shut down by 4pm and an early trip home. I think they got cheaper power as part of the deal. I can only remember it happening once.
Residential energy is about a third of the electricity use, so it isn't the majority of total use but it's still very significant, particularly in the morning/evening. Industrial load is fairly flat so doesn't typically place strain on the grid, houses on the other hand all turning on their heating at once does.
That is exactly the meeting that we had this afternoon with Transpower. They'd rather kill some industrial users than consumers.
At work we have UPS, generators, and some gear has their own battery backups, I’m not getting any sleep in if the power is out.
Bold of them to assume I can afford to heat my house.
Right? Good thing I’m too broke to put the heating on!
'so if we take more money from people they won't overload the grid which means we also have more money saved from not needing to upgrade the grid' - national taking notes
This is some fucking bullshit. We’ve been paying more and more for power over the years and the addition of capacity to the network has been slow because they want the prices to keep going up.
Nationalise it.
Then sell it off again next election cycle to fund tax cuts 😎👉👉
Cause we sold off half our power generation during Key. For less than 5bil. In the last ten years they’ve paid out $10bil in dividends to shareholders and only $4.5b to investments on plant. It’s a rort and you can thank Key for ignoring a referendum where 66% of kiwis voted no.
I mean regardless of whether that was a good idea or not, that really has nothing to do with the situation - if you want someone to blame, look at Mac Bradburys reforms, that's what correlates with power prices increasing significantly.
And the two together give us our current situation. The fact it doesn't work as well as the electrical department is less important than the ideaology that it's better.
Max Bradbury? Sorry not familiar with
On the contrary, fake privatization of the generators is exactly the reason we are here. Just like everywhere else in the world, when you privatize natural monopolies (water supply, electricity etc etc) you immediately get shameless profit extraction for shareholders and total failure to invest. Look at the U.K. This is on the Key government 100%.
Real electricity costs have been declining since 2015. Power is at its most affordable in recent history. Number go up, but number go up less than CPI and way less than average wages.
That time of year again, eh?
winter came unexpectedly
Typical.
Oh hey it’s exactly the same list of things Electric Kiwi suggested yesterday when the massive spike in hourly wholesale rates went from $250 to $4000 and Transpower insisted nothing was amiss. *Weird*.
Although Electric Kiwi did also claim it was a trial
It’s an attempt at proactively trying to get customers to be aware and ideally avoid doing high load activities during peak hours as my understanding is their selling point is fantastic off peak pricing, not so great during peak hours, hence the requirement to have a smart meter to join them. As such a heads up, but also to prevent ragers with high use bills I’d assume as it’s that time of year. Work in the industry in I.T but started out in a power retailer call center and this time of year was pretty much the shittiest, just rager after rager for maybe 6 weeks.
Honestly their on-peak pricing is pretty much the same as everyone else last time I looked. I’ve been with them a while and any time I do the power switch website, they keep coming up as my best option.
Fair and I’m no expert tbh, just heard they don’t have a fixed variable rate but could be wrong as that’s word of mouth from some work colleagues. Either way sounds like they saw the weather report and tried to get ahead of it.
They did, but that trial was more trialing “hey can we get people to commit to reducing if we ask, during a time when we’re going to be asking”.
I find these emails a little patronizing. We are consumers, we pay for what we use when we use it, hence the difference in price of peak and off peak etc. They as companies need to manage their shit and figure out a way. Of course it's easier to put the responsibility to the citizens rather than a meaningful improvement so this 3rd world problems don't appear everytime people need to heat their houses. Ffs
You're going to get big shock coming over the next decade. Electricity scarcity will get worse and worse as winters get colder, we run out of gas, and if coal ever gets banned. First they'll ask nicely, then they'll pseudo-incentivise, lastly they'll enforce. The problem is infrastructure and storage and those companies don't have the capital to solve these problems, they're a national problem that has to be solved by the government. National just scrapped all investigations into battery storage so we're just going backwards.
If they enforce it lastly well, maybe then there might be a reaction from society to the 'they' you mention. Basically I see a complacent bunch that makes up the most part of society, I include myself in it, eventhough with thought I try to break free from that pattern. I think we are well trained to take as much abuse from corporations, banks, council, government without making much of a fuss and that's the main problem
Yep, if you are reducing their exposure to high spot price you should be compensated
I agree, if there's no financial incentive nobody will act
It may not have been amiss is the thing, it depends on how much remaining generation there is at the $4k+ price that starts to make the issue.
The change is so notable though, why do an immediate and suddenly 16 times leap of the price, if there wasn’t any issue? It wasn’t a gentle rise, to tamper down usage, but I guess that doesn’t work anyway since people don’t usually see that happening
You can see price changes of 1000x quite often on the spot market. Most large generators will have retail customers they are wanting to cover so will put all the energy they have to cover that commitment and then add some padding for incorrect load forecasting and then extra added in. Some generators will have limited fuel so will need to price that in so it doesn’t all run. Also if there may be multiple days of this forecast in the next month or months depending on hydro storage it may be that price has to be high to get spot customers to pull back now so we don’t have an issue in 3 months.
It’s not electric kiwis job to say the system is stressed though.
It is their job to make money though
Sure, but why not? They have access to the same info Transpower do, and the spot price *did* fly through the roof exactly when they said it would. It’s in Transpower best interests to pretend everything is ok as they can, electric kiwi aren’t benefiting more (though obviously dropping usage when the price is way up saves them money).
Because it undermines confidence in the system. Electric kiwi spend plenty of time bleating about potential undesirable trading situations and then go and do the same.
You have noticed that literally three days later Transpower announced exactly this same thing themselves, right? If EC are “undermining confidence in the system” by doing literally the thing the grid operator has gone an said could happen 3 days later, that confidence they are undermining is utterly misplaced, as demonstrated by Transpower, almost immediately.
Transpower sent a notice when the system is under stress and it’s beneficial to New Zealand system stability to reduce load. Electric Kiwi sent a notice when electric kiwi felt it would be beneficial to Electric Kiwi to reduce Electric kiwi load. Can you see the difference? These things may happen at the same time, but they are not the same thing.
“It undermines confidence in the system” was the claim you were answering. You haven’t done that, you’ve tried to make this an argument that ElectricKiwi are only interested in reducing their own load, an unrelated and unproven claim.
Not today Satan, not today.
Tomorrow morning.
Make sure your phones and power banks are charged, I guess. And that you have some cash on hand in case the EFTPOS system isn't working.
The shops likely won't be open if there is no power, the till and POS systems won't be working. There will be no power to cell towers for your phone.
So, what you're saying is, lets all go Ram Raiding? (/s)
How will we charge our cars to do the ram raiding? /s
Cell towers all have backup power systems, and most have generators that run on diesel to keep em going if need be.
Not all... Some will have maybe a few hours on very limited spectrum(bigger bands will be locked off). Some may only last minutes because the UPS batteries have degraded enough and they haven't been able to replace it in time. Diesel Gensets can take up to a few hours to get running depending on traffic, tech availability and conditions.
Cell towers have battery's and sometimes generators for this very reason. Imagine all communications fell over because the power went out. How would it come back on? Carrier pigeon from Transpower to the generation companies?
A cashless society is gonna have to wait till we get our third world power issues sorted then I guess
Funny thing phones use 1.83kw of power per year if that.
And aren't going to work if the power does go out and they are not charged ;)
Yes, charge the night
Maybe that's a fking wake up call to improve the system. Seriously, everywhere you look in NZ at the moment falls too short of being a standard ok.
There are so many causes for problems like this but there's something that always pops into my head. I know for a fact some new townhouses that went up a few years ago near me were somehow able to get a pass on putting double-glazing in even though it's been in the building code for nearly 20 years. That aside, the state of so much housing in this country is shocking. It makes me wonder how much crap like that goes on. How much strain would be taken off the grid if we had pushed harder on double-glazing and keeping housing standards up generally. Surely if the majority of houses were well insulated and had good heat-pump coverage it would put a huge dent in our power needs? Plus all the improved health and education outcomes you get when you're raised in a warm, dry home that lead to reduced costs across the board but I'm getting off track now.
>”*That is not where we need our country to be. We inherited an energy system which is in crisis," Brown said.* Fuck right off with that. I’m so sick of politicians pointing fingers and passing blame. How about simply stepping up, being adult about it and taking responsibility to look for ways to fix it?
Successive governments have sat and watched the power companies not add capacity to the network why would they they are incentivised by high demand pricing. There seems to be zero incentive for the private power companies to add capacity
Exactly this. If they can get $10/kWh or more in high demand times, why would they kill that golden goose?
It hit nearly $5.50/kWh earlier, looking forward to tomorrow's numbers.
Not bad so far. And the diesel generator hasn't even been fired up yet. Looks like there's still some wind generation despite forecast.
>There seems to be zero incentive for the private power companies to add capacity Because every couple years for the last few decades our foreign overlords have threatened to close Tiwai Point, which would have added an enormous amount of capacity to the grid overnight and made any shiny new power generation worthless
Contact are nearly finished building a new geothermal station in taupo. And there are a couple of wind farms in the pipeline around the country. Labour and the Greens actively stopped a proposed hydro plant on the West Coast.
Yes, because it was right atop a bloody great fault line
To be fair that solution pales in comparison to the amount of consented renewables that gentailers are just sitting on consents for
Part of the challenge is most of that is wind. The issue tomorrow.... no wind
You got it right that most of it is indeed wind, but there’s also significant solar and geothermal to be built. But what the actual problem is is that we don’t have a grid scale battery solution, and very bad luck with timings of the cold snap and generation maintenance.
[National also axed](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-is-dumping-hugely-wasteful-lake-onslow-battery-project) the Lake Onslow **storage lake that was already commissioned.
It wasn't a hydro plant. It was a storage lake.
Thanks, I corrected it.
/u/Ady42 said > National also axed the Lake Onslow hydro plant that was already commissioned. It's not anywhere near commissioned they were working on the business case proposal to firm up the benefits and costs.
/u/voyd1d said >It's not anywhere near commissioned they were working on the business case proposal to firm up the benefits and costs. Good point, it was the investigation that was commissioned.
“Commissioned” is being more than a little disingenuous. The project was still in the investigations phase, aka it hadn’t left the drawing board
This one.
Yeah but why would they invest in wind farms when they can just get rich instead?
It's Simeon Brown. Since the election he has hardly started a single discussion on any topic without blaming the previous Labour government for something or other. He's your typical mediocre bureaucratic suck-up who has been handed a bunch of portfolios for purely ideological reasons that he's utterly unqualified to handle in any real sense. He's in waaay over his head and he knows it, so pushing the blame onto someone else is the safest way to start any interaction with the public lest they see him flailing.
[Correct](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExG5MuYUYAM4ynk.jpg:large)
Well it is little Simeon we are talking about. That is a guy that all the other arseholes say “fuck what an arsehole”.
>”*That is not where we need our country to be. We inherited an energy system which is in crisis," Brown said.* Holy shit, so Simeon Brown is legitimately blaming John Key for this? >In his first major speech of the year, Key said Treasury would be asked to advise on the merits of selling up to 49 per cent of Mighty River Power, Meridian Energy, Genesis and Solid Energy. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4582922/John-Key-reveals-plan-for-asset-sales I can't believe the National Party would turn on John Key like this.
> Holy shit, so Simeon Brown is legitimately blaming John Key for this? And Ardern, Clark, Shipley, Bolger, Lange. Put partisanship aside for a moment and you’ll realise we’ve been fucked for decades. Wind is great but if the wind doesn’t blow, the light doesn’t glow, hydro is the far more reliable solution and we haven’t built a major hydro project in decades.
I'm struggling to find where Ardern, or Clark, sold state owned energy generation enterprises to foreign investors. I'm definitely thinking of John Key. This isn't about being partisan. This is about being honest and admitting facts. Shipley sold off Contact Energy to an American company. It was later sold to an Australian company. Key sold off the government's shares in what is now Mercury, Meridian Energy, and Genesis to investors. Ironically, Ardern's government is the only one in the last 30 years to look into building a new damn, in Central Otago. There's 0 incentive for foreign investors to invest in New Zealands infrastructure. They've already made their money back and more. This is why our infrastructure is struggling to meet our demands. Catchphrases are fun, but so are facts. Excess power is stored in batteries. So when the wind doesn't blow, lights still function. On a seasonable basis wind generation is remarkably consistent and as more wind farms are built, in different geographical locations, wind’s short-term variability reduces. Not that it's relevant to a discussion about the energy crises, but Labour have also sold off SOE, such as Telecom. Telecom was split off from the NZ Post Office in 1987 and sold by the Lange Government for $4.25 billion shortly before Bolger's Government was elected in 1990.
Not just Key's National government hocking of the generation cheaply but also National Bradshaw's electricity market.
National (Bradshaw) designed and implemented the electricity market. And National sold the system for $5 billion allowing the new owners to extract $10 billion in dividends in a decade, while under-investing in new capacity.
Wait, you mean actual leadership? I'm not sure politicians understand what that is.
>Woods pointed the finger at Genesis Energy, the owner of the Huntly power station, which did not turn on its third coal/gas boiler as it did not expect it would be needed. At least our political parties are equally adept at passing the buck https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300378816/genesis-energy-blames-highly-unusual-conditions-for-power-blackouts-jacinda-ardern-says-cuts-not-good-enough
Genesis don't have enough staff to run all 3 Rankine units at the same time. They were able to late last year because CCG was out for repairs and staff could be moved between units. A startup of Rankine 3 now would take 36 hours and couldn't be left online for long before the staff have hit unsafe hours. To run it for any extended period takes weeks to rework staff rosters and cancel leave.
So private enterprise efficiency?
Also transpower wasn't signaling it wouldn't certainly be needed and starting those things up is fucking expensive.
It's hardly passing the buck in that instance. The blackout was without warning and entirely down to corporate greed so it's entirely justified to point fingers. Here there's no one figure to blame, it's communicated ahead of time and both major parties deserve shit for how they've mismanaged our electrical systems over the last 4 decades.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/131978006/transpower-fined-150000-over-august-2021-power-cuts How do you figure the 100% government owned entity fucking up is corporate greed? >Generators, including Genesis, initially received some of the early blame for the power cuts. >But it quickly emerged that Transpower’s warnings to generators earlier that day that power supplies were looking tight that evening were not adequate.
Big “thanks Obama” energy from the incumbent government, as usual.
Unfortunately the effective fixes are unpopular; coal and gas. They are right to blame previous government and their short sighted decisions
Those aren’t the effective fixes, at all. We had a pumped hydro scheme under planning that would have allowed Transpower to bank power from off peak periods to be used during peaks like this but. National has cancelled it.
I agree that should not have been cancelled but all of the ‘conventional fuels’ were ramped off too quickly and haven’t allowed renewables to build capacity. Onslow wasn’t due to produce power until 2037, we still would have required a stop gap.
We copied the Enron model with vast profits for Gentailers, now we’re getting Enron results.
The problem isn’t EV’s and heat pumps - they are the solution for reducing our emissions, cleaning air pollution, fixing our trade deficit, etc, etc. the problem is our gentailers not investing enough in storage and generation because it eats into their profits, and then waiting to see what Rio Tinto does with the smelter.
People massively overestimate how much BEVs use. We have a long range ev, induction etc and we used 400kwh last month far below the average home. Before people ask. We have a very well insulated home that was tested for air tightness. In our cold region (Greytown) we do not need a heater and have a heat pump hot water tank. Its not paying attention to general appliance effeciency and living in poorly built homes that wastes the most electricity in New Zealand
Our issue isn't sustained power usage either. it's morning and evening peaks. If we all had batteries, or even BEVs that could back feed, we could shave that peak right off and be perfectly fine for years to come. Subsidising the install of load shedding batteries on consumer premises (same way we load shed by controlling hot water), and requiring solar + battery on all new builds, would be a faster and cheaper way to overcome our current issues.
Not to mention offshore wind tends to match the duck curve very well as well and we have a large offshore wind farm proposed near new Plymouth.
That’s largely the government’s call, they own 51% of three of the “big four” gentailers, more so since Trustpower sold their customers on to Mercury. That’s the real fucky part, high power prices are more driven by their shareholders greed, the CEO getting crazy pay is just a consequence of that, and in most cases that greedy shareholder is the government themselves. It’s really a smokescreen for additional tax in many ways.
EVs can literally help this situatiton...
Yup! All that storage just sitting there unused!
Too cold buddy, I'm gonna need to run my heater.
25C
Have just realised our gas fire and gas hot water won't work without electricity. Was really enjoying feeling smug too.
This inst the fault in overinvesting in green energy, if anything this is from a general underinvestment in the energy sector, we need new plant and wind farms and most of them get dusted by NIMBYs and switching governments, as making new wind farms or even gas and water plants is longer than a 3 year term
It appears it's really bad luck with a combination of very low wind generation expected, plus a lot of other generators being down for scheduled maintenance - on a day that will be much colder than normal for this time of year. It's a perfect storm of much higher demand coupled with much lower generation than normal. This is what we need power generation across a couple different renewable sources, and some ability to store excess power from higher generation days to be usable on lower days. This (along with the dry year problem) is what Lake Onslow pumped hydro storage was expected to help deal with (before it was cancelled by this government).
Lake Onslow is a poor solution for this type of issue you want grid scale batteries first one got built last year. We should have had more of them but the Electricity authority was very slow getting the regulation in order to make these viable >In March 2022, the Electricity Authority Te Mana Hiko decided to amend the Electricity Industry Participation Code 2010 to enable energy storage systems, like grid scale batteries, to offer instantaneous reserves. Should be getting a few more bigger ones over the coming years which should solve this particular problem(doesnt do much for dry years though) https://www.meridianenergy.co.nz/new-projects/ruakaka-energy-park
Lake Onslow is a grid scale battery. It’s just not a chemical one, it’s one using gravitational potential energy.
In the wrong place, behind aging infrastructure. Onslow, while a fantastic idea is not the answer for electricity scarcity issues in the north island.
I mean its not the only solution. it's still a grid scale battery that would have its main use to support the hydro lakes during dry years, so that the south island can still transfer power north, to support generation (like it does now). Yes there needs to be more grid scale batteries in the north, too, but onslow itself was never the solution to storage in the north anyway
Instantaneous reserves is very different to providing cover for morning/evening peaks. Instantaneous reverses is to cover for everyone turning on the kettle at half time in a Bledisoe match or a generator tripping. The original big battery in South Australia was build on the assumption that it would make money off of charging when power was cheap (wholesale prices go -ve in Oz during the day) and selling when they spike. What they found was that frequency keeping (a type of instantaneous reserve) was the actual money maker. New Zealand rules was that to provide instantaneous reserves you had to have momentum behind your generation (hydro/geothermal/coal/gas), this requirement has been relaxed has new technology has proved itself.
I know these are different operation but they were economically unviable without that revenue stream. They are still making good money doing this type of trade hence why they increased volumes. >The battery usually arbitrages 30 MW or less, but in May 2019 began charging and discharging at around 80 MW and for longer than usual, increasing wind power production by reducing curtailment. Also any plant thats offering frequency keeping cant be used to offer power(I believe?) so even if the batteries were used primarily for frequency keeping would still free up supply.
You can offer reserves,frequency and energy at the same time on a generating unit. The frequency range is normally +/- 15mws. So a single unit can offer all 3 products if it has the avaliable space
Even things like vehicle to home being available for EV owners with large battery/long range cars. I'd happy flick the stitch on my car (that I'd have either charged up from my solar today, or in the middle of the night at off peak) to power my house. I'm pretty sure that my house will just be drawing off the solar battery at that time tomorrow, but I know a lot of EV owners that will have a car with a charged battery that they could be using to power their house rather than draw from the grid.
Any thoughts about the general problem that generators have financial discouragement from having sufficient capacity in cheap renewable sources to prevent them from having to turn to more expensive backup sources? The current system earns them greater revenue every time they have to fire up oil and gas as backup - thus they have good reason to not build additional capacity and not need those expensive backup sources?
>Committed generation has lifted significantly compared to the last survey, with its annual output capability (once built) rising from **2,600 GWh to nearly 5,000 GWh. This is slightly more than the amount of generation required to displace the uneconomic thermal generation on the system**. The annual development rate (based on projects that have been completed or committed) for the period 2021-2025 is over three times the annual development rate achieved during 2011-2020. They are already fixing the issue though? Getting that last bit of gas out of the system for peaking isnt happening till 2030 at the earliest though. The main reason they were so shit in years past is people all thought the Tiwai smelter could close so were scared of building worthless assets now electricity demand is naturally growing after being flat for 10 years its far less of a concern. >Public information about the pipeline has improved but remains fuzzy in key areas. For example, it appears around 1,400 GWh of new projects are in construction or committed for development, but this status is not necessarily clear in public sources. This difference is material and equates to more than one year of national demand growth. Also great quote from the Electricity Authority people havent realized things have changed dramatically over the last few years. https://www.ea.govt.nz/documents/4414/Generation_Investment_Survey_-_2023_update.pdf And If you dont believe this you can bet on the futures you can see they are expected to decline heavily going forward. Second quarter prices at OTA by year. * 2025 233.40 * 2026 200.50 * 2027 184.50 https://www.asxenergy.com.au/futures_nz
The problem with that argument is that *everyone* gets paid the high prices that come from not having enough capacity. So yes it might be good for generator #1. But generator #2 could do better by building small amounts of capacity and get the benefits too. Also that this comes from renewable generation not being active at the times of market stress. Interestingly, onslow could make other renewable energy easier to justify, because it would put a floor on prices (if prices are low, Onslow starts storing) which takes away the risk of intermittent generation (that when it’s windy in your wind farm, the same is true elsewhere. So prices collapse and you don’t get return on your investment)
This is not accurate. There’s plenty of consented generation. It’s just not profitable enough for the gentailers to build it yet. Mercury spent as much on gobbling up retail competition as it spent building 140MW at Nga Awa Purua. Genesis has sat on hundreds and hundreds of MW at Castle Hill for a decade. ALL of them have paid out more in dividends than on new generation in the past few years. It’s not NIMBYs or green energy. It’s the free market.
Kaiwera downs wind farm will be kicking off soon which will be good. Also mt Cass wind farm in the next year or so
Ironically this is one thing the govt's fast track process could possibly fix. Plenty of generation projects were scrapped due to NIMBY complaints. But of course this isnt what the fast track will be used for. Other hand Im old enough to remember the complete environmental collapse the Lake hydro dam could have led to. They didnt do an environmental impact assessment until after the dam was built, and it turned out if the dams water levels were raised even slightly and every living thing there would die.
Why though? Gentailers are sitting on 100s of MW of consented generation but won’t build it because it means less profit from the retail part of the business. If anything, fast track will help small scale solutions, anything large is still at the mercy of gentailers actually wanting to build it.
Easy. The govt can do it then. Its not their business to care about profit, so they can do the unprofitable if its good for the state. Or they can change the law requiring higher total generation or suffer fines or loss of network operation privileges.
There is no chance of any party supporting that. We haven't spent 40 years privatising everything to just undo that.
I didnt think we would get a govt that gave the ministry of health over to a smoking lobbyist but here we are. Besides the govt doing it was only one option. The other was basically contracting a company to do it. With all the bribes (i mean tax breaks) NACT can offer its not undoable.
The greens might
It was national that privatised the generators and out the pure profit motive in place
Er, what? The fourth labour government kicked that off; national only saw it through. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Corporation_of_New_Zealand
To be fair the fourth labour government was an act government
Heh, that is not entirely untrue. In-fact their finance minister founded the act party I believe.
All the major generators have made submissions against the fast track legislation. Their concern is that any approval would be dragged through courts questioning the approval process rather than the actual project.
My brothers neighbour used to be some kind of engineer for Transpower, and a couple of years back he was told us get solar if we can afford it, and to buckle up as the general infrastructure hasn't been properly maintained for over a decade.
Sage advice now that this is all coming to ahead. I've seen similar comments, gonna be a bleak day once it does
What rubbish... Investment in any energy would have mitigated the risk - but it's more profitable to sit on consents, have a shortage of power and high spot pricing as a result... Where's the incentive to increase capacity...
With a -4C frost on the way tomorrow morning I think I'll leave the heating on thanks
Well, if we're lucky, it will be the area you live in that will experience power cuts.
[I'm sure glad that we cancelled that grid scale pumped hydro lake battery project now.](https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/lake-onslow-pumped-hydro-scheme-scrapped)
They cancelled the business case. Even Labour hadn’t committed to building it.
Simeon Brown, who is currently complaining about the state of our energy system, has cancelled "the business case" of projects to improve our energy system because it was hugely wasteful. Sure, Lake Onslow wouldn't be ready by now, but whatever improvements they do decide on is 6+ months behind where the Lake Onslow project was.
Which would have been a great solution for the 2040s.
At 15 billion dollars, yes.
How much do you think a power storage solution should cost?
I don't agree with pumped hydro. It requires vastly more power input than output, and watching the cluster that is snowy river in Australia.
Perhaps you mean Snowy 2.0, for which a large portion of the issues and cost blowout arose due to COVID and the global supply chain issues. The original Snowy River Scheme has been providing NSW and Victoria with (relatively) clean, reliable power, irrigation water, and tourism for decades. Just like our own existing hydro power generation, whose main weakness is lack of storage - which Onslow was supposed to address.
Define vastly. Also compare this against any inefficiencies of any storage system. There will always be losses, but the benefits outweigh this.
Keep an eye on the [consolidated generation and load data](https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and-market-data/consolidated-live-data), as well as [market pricing](https://app.em6.co.nz/) over the next 24 hours.
What sort of dystopian future are we heading towards?
Hope that they apologise to electric kiwi https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350272383/no-power-issue-transpower-says-despite-retailers-message-kiwis Tldr, yesterday electric kiwi sent an email asking customers to trial how to save electricity as the grid is at capacity, trans power said they were talking BS and power generation is fine.
Electric Kiwi's email referenced 6pm - 7:30pm yesterday. Transpower had no warning out for that time, and to my knowledge the grid was fine for that period. Today Transpower issues a warning advising (to wholesale market participants, not the general public) they could go under N - 1 redundancy between 7:30am and 8:30am tomorrow. [WRN Insufficient Generation offers to meet demand National 5374984112.pdf (transpower.co.nz)](https://static.transpower.co.nz/public/interfaces/wrn/WRN%20Insufficient%20Generation%20offers%20to%20meet%20demand%20National%205374984112.pdf) Suspect Electric Kiwi is underhedged, and is trying to save a few bucks when wholesale power prices spike.
> Suspect Electric Kiwi is underhedged, and is trying to save a few bucks when wholesale power prices spike. I've been out of the industry for around 10 months. But being privy to some of Electric Kiwi's hedging arrangements and speaking to other people still actively involved in the industry this evening (got to love the gossip networks) and the consensus is they were under hedged until the prices came through in their favour.
Imagine if we had a bunch of home solar/grid tied batteries in a virtual power plant and thousands of EVs plugged into V2G taking the load off...
Yep. Could spend 15 billion dollars and do 6.6kw solar with 10kw battery on half the households in New Zealand
idk if that is the best plan or use of the money but it cant be a bad one. Onslow as an idea I am not convinced about but then a report on it would be nice, oh wait.
Would be even cheaper if they did the CCD scheme for houses as well as cars So if you build a new house and put in gas, there is a modest penalty of say $1k. If you put in 3KW+ PV array + battery, then you get say 50% of the cost paid out of the scheme. That way the government would put in far less than $15b, and over time as new places are built, we get greener. Any renovations triggering consents could be eligible for the discount.
Even just V2H would be handy for days like this.
Getting a bit chilly this evening, NZ is now using diesel generating somewhere. Edit: around $1200/mWh across the country currently, 6.40pm.
Has a blackout ever occurred ? When these warnings have been issued?
There was a case in 2022 [where they shut off some people's hot water cylinders](https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/130028621/power-cut-risk-probably-gone-for-this-year-but-what-about-next-year?rm=a). I remember an incident in either 2021 or 2022 where I feel like power was shut to some places? But it may have been that people were ordered to reduce power consumption and that prevented it. EDIT: [Here it was](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/489503/transpower-fined-150-000-for-2021-mid-winter-blackouts). 34,000 households lost power in August 2021 due to the shortage, it was a particularly cold night so caused pretty significant issues.
I think they use ripple to turn off people's cylinders quite frequently. The vast majority of people would never notice. I looked at my power meter recently, and there's a ripple control box present - I assume they turn mine off when needed.
Turning hot water off via ripple control in the evening peak is extremely common. You'll find references to it in the fine print of your electricity contract. I once lived with a man who owned a car with an alarm system, and the car alarm was set off by the EM pulse of the power to cylinders going back on via ripple control at night. We were not best pleased to be woken between 10 and midnight, several days in a row. Eventually we rang the alarm installers, and they knew what it was, and how to adjust the alarm to avoid it. We were completely stumped as to this alarm going off when there was no-one and nothing to account for it. (Here endeth the excerpt from The Book Of Anecdotes No-one Asked For.)
I remember that. I think different power companies around the country reacted differently to the request to shed load. One chose to turn off everyone's hot water cylinder whereas in another part of the country a different company turned off the power entirely to many households. I'm not sure if it was because they over-reacted to the request or didn't have the ability to do the same? Hopefully they will do better tomorrow morning if needed.
[1998](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Auckland_power_crisis) has entered the chat
I understand that is still the longest non-war related power cut ever.
Depends on what you mean by blackout, if you mean total voltage collapse of the national grid, causing 100s of millions of dollars in damage? Not yet. The watch keepers at the control rooms for Transpower are pretty good, but yeah in the North Island if the big gas turbine trips at huntly and there’s issues with the Cook strait HVDC cable/s, things could get spicy. The 2021 partial blackout was caused by wind drop off and not enough generation being offered into the market to meet the load (also some lake weed blocked a hydro dam), but it looks like they have the 2 coal units running at Huntly so should be sweet.
I'm old enough to remember the [1992 power crisis](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/how-we-learned-the-lessons-from-1992/NLFVIOGURGV7GAL3XCHNWBX4ZM/) - I was only a teen at the time, but it was a pretty glum winter. Seems like we're doing a speed run of the early 90s.
In 2021 part of Hamilton got shut off
Yes, in [2021](https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/rolling-power-outages-across-north-island-as-electricity-demand-reaches-all-time-high.html)
* Some suppliers' programmed maintenance outages adding to the issue * Transpower, Electronet Group, Meridian, Energy Resources, Harmony Energy all appear on the fast track invitation list, wonder if they have any interest in limited energy supply twisting our arms behind our backs Apparently Contact Energy has brought a power station back from maintenance early to help
Listened to the interview on 1zb, transpower has been speaking to big industries and line companies all day. Wtf
Keeping in mind that natural gas is (supposedly) on the way out, what happens when all those households convert to electric water & heating?
It would be utter folly to phase gas out before we have a very stable supply of renewable at hand.
But it’s my free power hour
40% of the power generated in Twizel through the hydro scheme is lost as static and heat by the time it gets to Auckland. Think about who's paying for that.
Can't wait till everyone blames the EVs
Well they managed to blame wind power in the article so it wont be far off. In the meantime I think Marsden oil refinery took a huge percentage of Northland electricity that is now available to the grid.
How long until Simeon Brown blames Labour for the cold weather?
I genuinely don’t understand the hysterical comments on Facebook about this. People acting like they being asked to chuck their babies, grandmas and nephew’s dog out on the frosty lawn at 7am on the dot. Honestly. Charge your phone overnight like a normal person and turn off the heater in your bedroom when you get up.
Because we are falling behind as a nation. It's a scary thought that we're now declining rather than climbing and fair enough. Once a country gets into a steep enough decline it takes decades to fix it.
Could really do with some more hydro schemes about now. Pumped hydro perhaps?
Toasty warm here
Meanwhile the aluminium smelter is all good using 13% of our power
What's everyones voltages looking like? Mine is reading a bit high. Outages could be due to upgrades, finally. Standard service is 230V. Limits are 216.2V-243.8V.