National Grid fails last night & the 7 words that terrify in NZ politics

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
40
2357

WTF? The National Grid failed last night???

Rolling power outages across North Island as electricity demand reaches ‘all-time high’

Areas across the North Island have been plunged into darkness on Monday night after demand for electricity reached an all-time high.

Transpower, which owns and operates New Zealand’s national grid, said in a statement posted to social media earlier Monday evening it did not have enough generation to maintain the demand.

“Insufficient generation has been made available to meet demand and manage a secure system.

“As a result, Transpower in our capacity as managers of the power system (the system operator) has asked the distribution companies to reduce load across the country.

The 7 most terrifying words in NZ politics are, ‘don’t worry, Megan Woods is on it’.

That the National Grid fell over last night should be leading the news , that Megan Woods is in charge should terrify.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

She is to Housing what Trump is to feminism. Her appalling lack of progress beyond comparing the lackluster build under Labour to the public housing sell off under National while 22512 people wait on emergency housing lists and 4000 kids in motels doesn’t fill me with much hope that she should be overseeing the National Grid collapsing.

At this stage Phil Twyford looks positively capable.

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40 COMMENTS

  1. This is what stupid looks like:

    *Massively increase NZ population.
    *Stop mining coal.
    *Stop exploring for gas.
    *Force people to remove log burners.

    Watch as the grid collapses on a cold night in winter when people have their heat pumps on.

    We haven’t even started plugging EVs in yet and we already can’t burn enough dirty imported coal and diesel to keep people warm.

    • Missed one there keepcalmetc. Instead of clean fuel independence at our own refinery we import all our fuel and become totally dependent on China!

      • I didn’t know China was a monopoly producer of oil products. It may be a good opportunity for Aotearoa to import the refined oil products including petroleum. Then each port in NZ could import their own petrol and offer more options and cheaper petrol.

  2. L0L ! – What happens when you privatize all our former publicly owned utilities saying prices will be lower and more ‘efficient’ because of more ‘competition’ eh, Roger?

    As I sit here shivering my ass off and the temperature is currently 3degrees in Auckland and running a heater is just too expensive. Pity help the elderly who were workers not wealthy business owners or executives and pity help children whose family’s cannot afford to heat their homes, – matter of fact , pity those who don’t even have a home, eh Megan !

    • Wild Katipo – The only thing I feared about growing old was being cold and it happened.

      When it began to snow I did turn a heater on because it was colder inside than out, and I’m crook and not wanting to get crooker. Just a small heater, but flanked by tin foil containers to try to capture and reflect the heat; foil containers are on special at $1.00 each and I bought two specifically for the purpose. Others ride around on buses all day, or sit in the public library windows.

      The apple picker has no heaters and says he tries to live according to the seasons and goes to bed when night falls. He cycles across town to collect the free food which the Salvation Army puts out on tables for the poor every Wednesday. On Saturdays he forages for fruit and veges in the Farmers’ Market rubbish bins.

      I go to bed thankful I have a bed and a roof and a cup of tea and a good book, and think of the thousands homeless in the freezing cold dark and wonder how politicians sleep at night, and whether they are sociopaths, or living in another world, or both.

  3. I have made the comment previously around power transmission. if you think the lack of infrastructure investment in transport and water is bad. Energy is worse.

    Think how bad this is going to be when all woke, middle-class bureaucrats and office workers in Auckland and Wellington have electric cars.

    We are already burning Indonesian coal/diesel and now energy companies have to turn the lights out. imagine if there are a couple of fatalities in the next 12 hours – who is to blame.

    • Yeah how about instead of taking our water infrastructure they nationalize electricity-Oh wait.

  4. ”The 7 most terrifying words in NZ politics are, ‘don’t worry, Megan Woods is on it’.’
    You reckon?
    What about:
    ‘No worries, Kris Faafoi will handle it.”?

    • David Parker the invisible Roger Douglas who should be in ACT, is the one I most fear to destroy NZ just like Roger Douglas. Now they have moved Phil Goff on to destroy Auckland Council and sell off its assets, the position was open for David Parker to take over Labour’s Rogernomics projects.

    • NOT the poor and the lower half of NZ earners, i.e. the real/poor working class, that is FOR SURE.
      There is NO real left wing party in NZ. LINO are TraitorKey light, or the same as the Blair UK Govt (1997-2007), except without the mass murdering and lap dogging to the brutal USA dictatorship of most of the world. But she’s not finished yet, so maybe she’ll surprise us there with even more treachery.
      Beware the evil smiler. That used to be said about TraitorKey. Now I’m not so sure who is the worst of them.

  6. Power generation and supply (most of the infrastructure already built and paid for by NZ workers and taxpayers) should be restored to full public ownership. The artificial retail market ended. Any compensation to the bludgers at Meridian etc. should depend on their behaving themselves during the transition.

    Send Rio Tinto packing and reallocate that power source.

    Bypass the greenwashing companies and various weird bylaws, and just legislate for solar panels and storage arrays on all housing and commercial buildings!–for starters…

  7. For fuck sake. Did they run out of COAL at Huntly power station?

    Man oh man they must be hoovering through that shit at the moment. Who says coal is bad? Not our government. Night Meagan. She’s real. Not when it powers non emission producing items to make Greater Auckland’s readership feel good about themselves. Not our generations nuclear free moment.

    How many antivaxing vegans laptops and cellphones went flat mid tweet on climate change?

    I blame the smug nose tapping wankers with their Nissan Leafs, Teslas and fucking e bikes.

    It gives so much and yet asks so little.

  8. Uh, oh.
    “Insufficient generation has been made available to meet demand and manage a secure system.
    Reality strikes are as electrifying as lightning strikes. The great USA has brownouts and blackouts, so I guess that’s acceptable, as they are always right. Competition in electricity availability in NZ is handled between 29 entities (for under 5 million people!) I didn’t hear just which, what was being counted, sometimes I don’t want to hear too much, bad for my heart. But seeing the facts in print is, well sobering, and all I have imbibed is tea!

    Info: What Are Brownouts? The biggest difference between blackouts and brownouts is that blackouts are a complete shutdown of power whereas brownouts are partial outages. Instead of the power going out completely the system capacity is reduced. The voltage is usually reduced by 10-25%.11/12/2020
    The Difference Between a Blackout and A Brownout – Spark …
    https://www.sparkenergy.com › the-difference-between-a-

    The USA: The specter of blackouts highlights a paradox of the clean-energy transition: Extreme weather fueled by climate change is exposing cracks in society’s move away from fossil fuels, even as that shift is supposed to rein in the worst of global warming. States shuttering coal and gas-fired power plants simply aren’t replacing them fast enough to keep pace with the vagaries of an unstable climate, and the region’s existing power infrastructure is woefully vulnerable to wildfires (which threaten transmission lines), drought (which saps once-abundant hydropower resources) and heat waves (which play havoc with demand).
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/u-s-west-facing-white-knuckle-summer-with-power-in-short-supply

    This 2019 article is informative about the UKs problems with maintaining power and follows a blackout that resulted in train passengers being stranded for six hours in one. Political and technological and ideological, a clash of perspectives that can result in stasis.
    https://www.power-technology.com/features/between-the-eu-and-a-technological-hard-place-what-is-behind-uk-blackouts/

  9. This happened in the US. When they investigated Enron they found that Enron executives deliberately denied power so it would drive up their electrical spot pricing.

    When you live in a country that worships coal and doesn’t see solar power coming and climate change, then that is also part of the problem.

    Rio Tinto takes 13% of the national power grid but has been getting subsidies for decades from government.

    One of the focus on climate change think tanks is that if governments stop subsidising polluting industries like coal, oil, petrol and nuclear and banking supporting those industries then market forces will fix the climate change problems faster. (Granny Herald also mentions this research but out of context aka the neoliberal spin not getting the polluter subsidies bit only the stop regulation bit).

    These 100 Companies Are Responsible For The Climate Crisis
    Paper straws won’t save us. We need politics
    https://medium.com/swlh/these-100-companies-are-responsible-for-the-climate-crisis-107c5855b2f4

    Same with plastic pollution.

    Among the global businesses responsible for 55% of the world’s plastic packaging waste are both state-owned and multinational corporations, including oil and gas giants and chemical companies, according to a comprehensive new analysis.
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/18/twenty-firms-produce-55-of-worlds-plastic-waste-report-reveals

    Coca-Cola, Nestlé and PepsiCo named top plastic polluters for the second year in a row
    https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/2019/10/23/brand-audit-report-2019-press-release/

  10. Electricity company fined for misleading power bill review
    https://comcom.govt.nz/news-and-media/media-releases/archive/electricity-company-fined-for-misleading-power-bill-review

    Enron defrauded California out of billions during energy crisis
    “Documents released Monday by the Federal Energy Regulation Commission revealed Enron Corporation deliberately created real and imaginary shortages during the 2000-2001 California energy crisis, in order drive up prices and reap vast profits in the state’s newly deregulated energy market.”
    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/enro-m10.html

    “It’s morally repugnant that big electricity players are knowingly taking steps to slow the uptake of solar because they see it as a threat to their bottom line. It’s time for the Government to overhaul this diseased industry.”

    “It’s been revealed that the New Zealand’s last coal-fired power station in Huntly is now firing up at full capacity, with owner Genesis Energy even buying extra coal from Indonesia to power it.

    In April last year, Genesis announced it would be keeping Huntly’s coal burners on for at least another four years, despite previously promising to turn them off by 2018.”
    https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/06/21/time-for-diseased-electricity-industry-overhaul-greenpeace/

    Way to be cleared for big electricity players to prey on low-income households
    https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/102708888/way-to-be-cleared-for-big-electricity-players-to-prey-on-lowincome-households

    NZ Power Companies are not even Compliant under EU and US Laws!
    https://ecotricity.co.nz/nz-powercos-noncompliant-under-eu-us-rules/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=Non+Compliant+Blog+Release&utm_medium=paid&hsa_cam=6116002037136&hsa_src=%5BSITE_SOURCE_NAME%5D&hsa_acc=10152756314334928&hsa_ver=3&hsa_net=facebook&hsa_grp=6116002037536&hsa_ad=6116002037936&fbclid=IwAR0PwZmsmg8Q1b-aevcUijRowgavgNNT36_46yPRedul03imfWS6dSHLapc

    Rio Tinto waste – just throw your hazardous waste in the local towns – years of meetings, no action.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI_LjMsr8gU

  12. Due the source of their power Rio Tinto produce the greenest aluminum in the world and 800 workers get some of the best paid jobs in NZ. This climate problem effects the World so stopping production in one place so another less green country produces a material is not a good plan .
    When they close my understanding is that the power not used cannot go North . Perhaps a person with more knowledge than me can say if that is true and why.

    • Hopefully the emergency housing motels have their own generators for the NZ families. Sarcasm. I guess the car batteries can be more reliable that our national grid for the homeless families sleeping in cars.

      • You can do that in most countries, but it is illegal to do it in NZ. It’s be available in Japan for 10+ yrs.
        We are so NOT GREEN.

  14. It wasn’t the grid that failed, its that there was not enough power on the grid. I call bullshit on this – hydro lakes are back to normal so supply could be ramped up in a few seconds. Digging deep will likely show that generators deliberately withheld supply to keep spot prices high. That’s what happens in a faux-market like ours. The government immediately needs to split these pricks up into generation and retail, stop penalising households for uptake of solar, and subsidise solar and batteries everywhere including making it mandatory on all new homes, and incentivise new solar and wind everywhere. A fully distributed infrastructure, as is being build in e.g. NSW with Tesla PowerWalls, would stop this from ever happening, and should be mandatory with the climate crisis.

    • By the looks of it, you are spot on.

      The market at work, freezing people and stuffing business.

      The government should nuke this industry for this.

  15. Richard. Humour. If I have to explain the point is lost….

    You need to relax a little in front of that coal fire in your lounge! Courtesy of Meagan.

    • “Richard. Humour. If I have to explain the point is lost..”

      lols, John liked it, I wonder what that means.

  16. Yet again we see a failure of the ‘market’ to provide for our needs; time to renationalise all the assets we sold.

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