Simpleton Brown: an idiot about power

Just been looking at the solar policies between National and Labour on RNZ “Labour promises subsidies, new loan schemes for installing solar“.

What I was most struck by was a statement by the gormless simpleton from National that displays a complete lack of understanding of actual Kiwis.

These days it is increasingly hard to find anyone who trusts the power companies, their shareholders – especially the government, or anything related to our national electrical systems. There is good reason for that. Just look at Simeon Brown’s knee jerk responses to Labour’s solar policy.

The simpleton’s reaction to the Labour announcement:-

While National’s policy document did not mention plug-in solar, campaign chair and energy minister Simeon Brown posted on social media on Tuesday that “work is underway” to develop plug-in solar standards.

Brown says Labour’s solar policy will cost more than National’s and “put the country’s energy security at risk”.

Which bloody country has this fool been living in for the last 30 years. We have absolutely no fucking security of supply now. It’d be hard to find anyone who hasn’t had a unplanned power outage in the last 5 years, or even over the past year. As for planned outages, they seem to frequently enough that I have uninterruptible batteries on all critical gear.

Developing electricity standards should not be a multi-generational project. Mostly in this case it is having protocols for grid disconnection, now extensively handled in Australia – especially in South Australia and in many places further away. There will be issues with some antique grid connections in houses that will require regulation requiring upgrades. But this isn’t a lot of work, and capable of being handled entirely in regulation. Probably more a matter of removing opportunistic obstruction by the power companies, than anything else.

He goes on to say:-

“Labour’s announcement is essentially National’s policy with a bigger price tag. They’ve managed to take the same idea and make taxpayers pay more for it.”

Huh? These are the same taxpayers who’d be installing solar panels and batteries that will directly reduce their excessive power bills. After all, apart from most overseas corporates, almost everyone resident in NZ pays taxes. But I sense that the Simpleton Brown is merely looking for a politics of envy meme.

Brown said after years of attacks on the government from Labour about mills and factories closing, there was an easy solution to help keep the lights on and make energy more affordable.

“If Labour genuinely wants to accelerate renewable energy, the best thing it could do is support Fast Track, which is already cutting through red tape and bringing renewable generation online sooner.”

The moron hasn’t figured out that mostly people put in solar and batteries for two reasons. To reduce their domestic power costs, and so the decaying power systems that are failing kiwis cannot cut their power yet again.

Very little of it is in the Fast Track processes because power companies would probably have to explain why they haven’t worried about pushing existing renewable projects – often for decades.

In any case, the problem is that as far as I can tell, almost all of the new renewable energy that might go through fast track will not be directed not at dealing with the abysmal supply and rapidly rising costs of residential power. National and the gentailers are directing it largely towards things like new Data Centres.

For instance, down in Invercargill there will be a wind farms, probably solar farms, and some hydro going in to support the Datagrid Data Centre.

It will be by far the largest data centre ever built in New Zealand – and the first in the South Island that meets the technical requirements of hyperscale companies like Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft. 

At 280 megawatts, it will single-handedly increase New Zealand’s current total compute capacity by 65% when it opens in 2028. It will be the second-largest energy user in the country after Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter, consuming more each year than the entire city of Wellington. It’s permitted to draw up to 220 million litres of groundwater per year – roughly equivalent to seven Southland dairy farms. It will also destroy a nearby wetland (which Environment Southland says is of “very low ecological value”) and is likely to disturb native marine species at Ōreti Beach when it is connected to a new undersea cable. 

Mercury has contracted for 140 megawatts mostly from a existing nearby wind farm. Whoever provides the other 140 megawatts required will probably fast track the power projects – but not to reduce domestic costs of power.

Simpleton Brown would be hard put to point to any Fast-Track power development that is largely directed at relieving current domestic power costs. In fact, based on his obvious disconnect with who the domestic users of electrical power are, he’d probably have a problem identifying them at all. But tat is probably because he is so useless at detail that his mouth just pushes out rubbish memes for the congenitally stupid – probably we can expect Mike Hosking to have some of these simpleton talking points on auto-repeat.

Meanwhile the current electrical power regime, instituted back in the 1990s by National, maintains its clear and singular focus on benefiting shareholders, by maintaining a domestic scarcity of high priced electricity and providing cheap electricity for off-shore users like Data Centers.

As far as I can see, domestic electrical consumers will get little to no benefit from any Fast Track proposals. I’d expect that none of them will significantly stop the steady rises in domestic power bills that have been happening over the last three decades.

From 1990 to 2015, residential power prices rose by more than 79% in real terms. It plateaued briefly, and then started rising again under the combined effects of some predicable dry years (capacity hadn’t been built to cover the risk), and the long deferred maintenance of the electricity grid in the 2020s and 2030s – especially the replacement of 2 out of 3 Cook Strait cables. These are both the direct results of the disincentives built into out current electricity market to anticipate entirely predictable future events.

What is noticeable is that we haven’t seen since 1990, any real residential drops in electricity prices from the electricity market.

What has happened generally is that households have gotten considerably more efficient in their use of electricity – reducing household usage, while kW/hour prices kept rising. Pretty obvious when you look at the price index graph exactly how much the power companies are ripping off consumers.

Generators and retailers have failed to produce any efficiencies for the residential sector in their electricity market. In economic terms this is a characteristic of an extractive monopolistic resource economy.

This rather puts Simpleton Brown’s “put the country’s energy security at risk” into perspective. The energy security at risk from residential solar, wind, and batteries isn’t for domestic consumers at all. It primarily a risk to gentailers and their shareholders profits. The largest shareholders being Simpleton Brown’s government, and probably their supporters.

The effect of making it easier for consumers to fast-track their adoption of household power generation and storage will be simple. Just as it has in Austrailia, it will force the moribund monopolistic electricity sector to have to change rapidly.

It will reduce the incentives to put in or run expensive plant like thermal power stations or LNG terminals that will substantially increase the cost of domestic power. It will reduce the need to ship electricity over long distances, thereby reducing some of the urgent need to do costly upgrades. If residential solar and batteries feed into the grid, it will force lines companies to harden their grid, thereby reducing the current frequent outages.

Like Austrailia, a plan like the one that Labour is proposing will get the widespread adoption of electricity generation and storage will force the power companies to have to adapt to a rapidly more efficient electricity marketplace. It will trigger a transformation in the economy.

National’s pathetic solar policy that only targeted a very small number of already affluent households (about 80k) who could have afforded solar and batteries out of their own resources anyway.

Labour’s policies form a wedge to normalise the installation of solar and batteries across most households. More importantly it provides in the economy, the basis to rapidly expand the capability to do such installations. Morever, committing to plug-in solar rather than just dithering about thinking about it will expand it into tenants lives as well.

That is a real fast-track in raising the productivity of our economy. It reduces the insidious economic costs of high domestic electricity prices across the whole economy while also providing a productive need for more people to train and work.