Energy crisis - Will Kiwis be able to heat their homes this winter?

Transpower said to turn off heaters and lights in rooms people were not using. Photo / 123rf

Opinion

EDITORIAL

Kiwis yesterday woke up to freezing temperatures and a warning from Transpower that the country’s electricity grid was potentially not going to cope with everyone’s power needs.

New Zealand households were asked on Thursday to conserve electricity and not use their heaters as much, to prevent overloading the country’s power grid as energy demand was expected to outstrip supply on Friday morning.

It was a surprising request as the country is not even in the depths of winter yet so it seems fair to wonder what the electricity grid will be like in August, when puffer jacket season is in full swing.

The request was said to have been made “out of an abundance of prudence”.

Contact Energy boss Mike Fuge told the Mike Hosking Breakfast on Newstalk ZB on Friday morning that Transpower was being “prudent” in warning about possible power cuts.

According to Fuge, Transpower likes to have a spare 200-250 megawatts of “residual generation” for the country.

“When they start to get within that zone, as a matter of prudence they say, ‘Look, we need to do a bit more to make sure they maintain that gap’,” he told Hosking.

“So Transpower’s warnings are very much out of an abundance of prudence, to stimulate generators to bring all the generation they can bring to bear.”

He also said that investments are being made to increase power-generating capacity, including the new Tauhara geothermal power station. “But the cold has come a bit earlier, and the project is running a bit late.”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Energy Minister Simeon Brown blamed the energy warning on the previous Government.

“I knew it would be challenging and I knew it would be tight... but the reality is [this is] the outcome of six years of not sending the right messages to our electricity sector, to make sure we have the generation we need,” Brown said.

“I think people are waking up this morning and they are aware that it is tight and I’m very grateful that New Zealanders are heeding the message this morning.”

Brown said previous Labour-led Government policies, which focused on moving to more renewable sources of electricity, were responsible for the current situation.

“The industry said, this is having a chilling impact on investment,” he added.

Act Party leader David Seymour has called the potential cuts “Third-World stuff”.

Some households will have hot water cylinders cut off, and if we still use too much electricity, some will have power supply shut off entirely.

If you think this sounds like third world stuff, ACT agrees.

— David Seymour (@dbseymour) May 9, 2024

The Consumer Advocacy Council (CAC) called this warning a “wake-up call”.

“It’s disappointing this has happened so early in the winter, but it’s a timely wake-up call for the industry,” CAC chairwoman Deborah Hart said.

“We have a long-term challenge in New Zealand to manage winter peak demands as our population grows and the country electrifies. The council’s view is that fundamental change is needed to the wholesale market - there must be sufficient renewable energy available all year round.”

Meanwhile, as the Government throws blame around, people reliant on electricity for medical reasons are told to have a back-up plan and to call 111 in an emergency. New Zealanders have to worry about whether they’ll wake up with power on to heat up their homes (and count ourselves lucky if we can still afford to do so).

Writing this on late Friday morning, it seems Kiwis seriously heeded the call to keep their appliances off and avoided disaster.

We’ve been here before and we know this will happen again. In the meantime, there are many musings about what causes it and who’s to blame but there seems to be a lack of realistic solutions being put forward, just a lot of “strategising” and other business lingo.

A developed country of five million people, in 2024, should not be a place where people go to sleep wondering if they can heat up their homes on a still autumn morning the next day.