Energy planning
Saturday 7 Nov 2009
Editorial
Otago Daily Times
If there is to be one critically advantageous long-term outcome from the Environment Court's rejection of the Project Hayes wind farm it should be that the nation's energy planners - including the present Government - will be compelled, finally, to confront the need to give far more weight to size and proximity of generation facilities to the major electricity markets, particularly in the top half of the North Island.
For too long, the default position has been that the South Island offers endless bounty and is simply waiting to be exploited, regardless of the infrastructural costs associated with conveying captured energy to end-users and the destruction of the natural environment.
One of the more emphatic arguments of the opposers to Project Hayes was one often advanced but rarely accepted in project hearings: visual environmental pollution, in this case entailing up to 176 giant turbines on the Lammermoors.
It is a largely subjective argument but it has been gaining potency and appears now to have been acknowledged.
It is most decidedly the position of a large numbers of residents in Otago, and of visitors to it, that the beauty of its lakes, rivers and mountain ranges is unsurpassed and should be preserved against the large-scale industrial development which Project Hayes represented.
The South needs to comprehensively put a permanent high value on its natural beauty: many, quite rightly, regard it as priceless.
The destruction of the wild Clutha River by hydro-electric dams was mourned by earlier generations; the original Project Aqua to so modify the Waitaki River as to effectively wreck any remaining natural qualities on its lower part drew vigorous opposition, substantially on aesthetic grounds, from a new generation.
Another weight of objection remains unanswered with regard to a dam on the Nevis River.
Clearly, the defenders of the natural environment - so far as it actually is in that state today - are gathering strength.
This cannot be surprising where official policy champions a "100% pure" environment illusion.
There is a strong economic argument to preserve such natural features as remain in the South and to reject any further large-scale modification of them by industry.
If New Zealand is to continue to earn a substantial portion of its revenues from visitors, let alone try to maintain its claimed natural purity, then it must give the most significant parts of the landscape a higher priority.
It does so with national parks and the like and in many other places where reserves of one kind or another exist, but the Project Hayes and Project Aqua hearings have shown that the "environment" is not limited to the world's hunger for natural places, pretty beaches, mountain ranges and lakes.
Those hearings also exposed another weakness in that the State, content to promote the 100% pure fantasy and claim the benefits from it, is not always perceived to act as public defender of that vision.
The secret deals by which the Department of Conservation received monies from the promoters of the projects quid pro quo for not objecting to them have not only undermined the department's public credibility but destroyed what hopes existed - however misplaced - that the department's priority is preservation rather than pragmatism.
The strongest economic argument for Project Hayes was the apparent value of wind power as a renewable energy resource.
But Meridian Energy's failure to provide a sufficiently thorough or convincing cost-benefit analysis of its scheme must stand as a warning about the deceptive enchantments of "renewable energy", and of the need for all the true costs of development to the community to be considered.
Inevitably, such an analysis was weakened when the major markets for electricity principally lie far to the north of the proposed Otago site.
It is illogical for power planners not to be placing greater emphasis on seeking generating sources closer to commercial demand.
New Zealand's last taboo is nuclear energy, yet it was once officially recommended to be introduced in the form of a generating plant near Auckland in the late 1970s.?
That was shelved as being not needed before the millennium.
It needs to be considered again in discussions about alternative energy sources, as indeed must be energy conservation measures and, above all, actual need.?
The provision of energy is one of the biggest challenges facing this country.
The agreed view between the Government and power companies, that generating capacity be increased with an emphasis on renewable energy, needs closer scrutiny.
Part of that view also includes the inhibition of individual objection: despite such draconian policies as demanding security for costs from poorly-funded objectors, Project Hayes has demonstrated the absolute need for the closest possible examination, with the communities most affected by major projects having a principal say in that consideration.
Here, not much more than a handful of private citizens felt bound to take on the twin forces of a state-owned enterprise and the State itself - one that demanded "whole of government" support for the project - to uphold environmental values universally claimed to be cherished.
They have won a victory that in time the nation will come to cherish, just as did those pioneering campaigners who saved Lake Manapouri.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
More Than a Victory - A Turning Point
Labels:
Clutha dams,
Manapouri,
Wind Farms
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