A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
It was good to see the Mayor and Matt Todd at the fascinating talk on lines companies organised by the Chamber of Commerce. It was amazing to see so few in attendance for an impartial analysis of a hot topic, as if those at the heart of the asset-sale decisionwere determined not to be influenced by facts.
Angela Ogier described the goal of boosting electricity from 25 percent of all energy consumption to 55 percent by 2050, with the daunting aim of building new renewable capacity at the rate of 450MW per year.
My reaction is that official planning fatally overlooks the prophetic 1970s concept of economic contraction: the easiest way to change that ratio is to cut non-electric energy by 75 percent, bringing total consumption down by just over half, 55 percent. Not a big ask when half of all jobs are toxic or unnecessary. Cutting them is cost-free and earth-saving.
This avoids all the resource and fossil-fuel consumption in building new generation, and can happen much, much faster, as climate science now dictates.
The notion of community “benefit” in the Commerce Act is dangerously ambiguous, and sets the trap of confusing business growth with general wellbeing — another much-abused word. Equally wrong is the word “distribution”: making grants or investments, no matter how good some of them certainly are, is a selective process, and thus the opposite of distribution. Distribution means spreading. To use it for its opposite, in our Eastland Network debate, is manipulative.
The punchline was a summary of pros and cons of various types of lines ownership. Public ownership can address energy poverty and decarbonisation, return profits to the community, and be more flexible. Private ownership, it appeared, had the virtue of being “unable to be captured by community interest groups”. Woops, we have public ownership but have been captured by a group unanimously bent, it seems, on business expansion.
