I was struck by just how out of touch Simeon Brown is with the frustration of residential consumers of electricity. The ever rising prices, the frequent outages, and the stupidity of our electricity market. National’s fast-track doesn’t address any of that, nor their minuscule solar plan. Labour’s plan is a more useful fast-track to transform our real productive economy. Far more so than just exporting profits offshore from mining and data centres
This is a very impressive policy from Labour
Energy Minister Simeon Brown is peddling lies about a gas shortage. The country exports around 40 percent of its annual gas production as methanol. More is used to make synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, a nasty greenhouse emission source, for our farms. We don’t need expensive LNG distribution facilities while exporting the bulk of our own gas.
Anyone who has been around tech for the last couple of decades will be aware of the liberating and industry disruptive effect of batteries. This caught my attention – “Tesla May Have Invented a Million-Mile Electric Car Battery”. It was well worth the read.
Profit gouging or genuine need?
Two recent events, one involving a WTO challenge to India’s subsidy for local Solar Panel manufacturers and the other the local review of New Zealand’s electricity grid suggest that the free market is not the best mechanism to use to create sustainable electricity supply.
There’s an issue for solar power about to hit: Standards NZ’s new proposed standard requires the use of a particular, untested, inverter which is not expected to even exist until July 2014. The current 2005 standard on solar power production allows electricity lines companies to enforce their own set of standards onto independent solar power installers.
Chinese manufacturing and state support is transforming the cost structure of solar technology. This in turn is helping to put in power support for the emerging use of wireless technologies in the developing world. This helps to ensure that less dirty carbon emitting technologies are not used in the developing world.It is hard to see a downside to this state initiative because it makes solar tech cheaper and more available earlier rather than later.
An experimental solar-powered plane completed its first 24-hour test flight successfully Thursday, proof of concept that an aircraft can collect enough energy from the sun during the day to fly all night. The eventual goal is to fly it round the world…
You can read more about it here.
