After a dangerously dry winter, spring has brought heavy rainfall which has filled the hydro lakes and sent wholesale electricity prices tumbling to unusually low levels.
Transpower has stopped its emergency electricity supply management and the energy crisis has been averted — at least for a time.
New Zealand has mostly survived the winter but it paid a price. Thursday was the last day of operation for Winstone Pulp International after almost half a decade of business.
And, Oji Fibre Solutions is also closing its mill in Auckland. Both these businesses faced other financial pressures but high energy prices sealed their fate.
More businesses temporarily halted operations. The aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point reduced its output, Methanex stopped production to sell its gas supply, and Pan Pac Forest Products paused work for a couple of weeks.
These closures will be another whack for our already miserable economic output and current account deficit. But impossible to measure are the costs incurred by investors choosing not to set up business in New Zealand due to the high price of electricity.
Critics of the electricity market structure complain the country’s energy demand is being moulded to match supply, when it really ought to be the other way around.
No intervention worth the mention
The Electricity Authority has established a task force with the Commerce Commission to look at ways to boost competition and encourage more investment in new generation.
It has eight initiatives but the most interventionist of these would be to require gentailers to deal with all retail business on the same terms as with their own retail divisions.
The Coalition Government has shown a limited appetite for intervention so far, but it has promised to consent an LNG import terminal — as long as it is completed within three years.
It has also promised to reverse the oil and gas exploration ban. However, none of these measures are likely to do anything to secure New Zealand’s energy supply next winter.
If 2025 turns out to be another dry year, the energy problem could get even worse.
Transpower warned this week the risk outlook was “concerning” as gas supplies would still be limited and the Tiwai Point demand response couldn’t be used two years in a row.
“It is critical the industry continues to focus on fuel storage and availability ahead of 2025, including across controlled hydro storage and thermal fuel arrangements,” it wrote.
“Peak capacity risks, especially in cold snaps, will persist until there is sufficient investment in flexible resources such as batteries, demand response and peaking generation.”
While New Zealand was able to avoid power losses this winter, it relied upon a 185 MW reduction in energy use from Tiwai Point which will not be available next time.
The network operator appears confident it can cope with another dry winter but does worry about unexpected cold snaps and generation outages. There’s little margin for error.
Gentailers grow market share
Forsyth Barr analysts said these concerns about winter 2025 were evident in electricity futures trading at $233 per megawatt hour, similar to prices in early July when conditions were dry.
For context, the average wholesale electricity price in September—now that the hydro lakes are full and the weather is warmer—was just $80 per megawatt hour.
Futures contracts for 2028 also began trading this week at an average price of $152, well above the estimated cost of new supply which ranges between $115 and $120.
“The strong message from the market is to continue building new generation, and preferably build faster,” Forsyth Barr wrote in a note to clients.
If construction continues at its current pace, supply and demand may not get back into balance until after 2030. Although, the analysts thought the pace would increase.
While the period of high prices hasn’t boosted gentailer margins, Forsyth Barr said four biggest players all increased market share for the first time since 2016 in August.
“This is a strong sign that independent retailers are under pressure at present,” the analysts wrote.
Flick Electric was the only non-generator to even marginally gain customers. The company’s website says it is “calling out rule breakers” and lobbying to “break up big power companies”.
In a recent blog post, a company spokesperson said Flick had had to limit its growth because the cost of taking on new customers was too high.
“It’s our view that these recurring sky-high prices aren’t just the symptoms of short supply — they’re also the symptom of a market structure that allows power prices to keep rising”.
It's unlikely that any intervention in the electricity market can prevent the next three years of tight supply and high prices ahead. But, while we grit our teeth and bear it, policymakers should think hard about how to ensure the problem doesn’t repeat itself.
91 Comments
What would you propose as an alternative to sustainable energy sources? Considering our most expensive generation is fossil fuel-based. The biggest issue was selling our power-generating assets and creating an energy market that has nearly zero incentive to try and lower power prices.
This is a dumbass comparison. We don't have anywhere near the energy reserves that the United States does, or any hope of having anything close to the scale of their oil industry.
They have enormous natural gas reserves from shale fields that they practically have to give away. This will never, ever be the case in New Zealand even if we sunk billions into oil/gas infrastructure. Per Kwh it's more cost-effective to be investing in renewables rather than chasing diminishing returns from our fossil fuel reserves which will never be able to compete with overseas deposits that are significantly closer to the markets they are actually serving. We easily have the capacity to bring more renewable energy into the picture, but the main barrier to that is gentailers that are benefitting from high power prices rather than investing in new infrastructure because the market incentive is completely broken.
Wind, solar, and geothermal are the future.
But maybe we need to renationalise the production and distribution of electricity.
https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2024/08/public-ownership-of-en…
https://www.interest.co.nz/economy/129137/new-zealand%E2%80%99s-electri…
It really doesn't matter what the future of generation may be. Until the market is separated into generation, distribution and retail we're going nowhere.
Or put another way, the big 'electricity' companies, which are both generators and retailers aka gentailers, really have no significant driver to produce more electricity as their profits as assured by doing 'nothing much' and raising prices whenever they need more profits.
Once the split of gentailers occurs - into pure generation and pure retail, with zero cross ownership and total market layer limited to 33% - we'll see far more competition, as when you have just one product to produce and sell, the only option is produce more, or produce it at a cost less than your competitors. (That last part is fairly critical as far as the uptake renewables like wind and solar are concerned.)
But our government? "All good here boys and girls. Nothing to see. Let's build more roads and provide corporate welfare to construction companies."
It's not a dumb ass comparison. What I take from it is that our electricity prices are too high. We will never achieve US prices but we should never implement measures to become equitable with the UK. One caveat for higher but still likely lower than NZ are US electricity prices if dumb ass Kamala gets in.
One day the USA will no longer have the fossil reserves to fuel their electricity demand and their empire will collapse as it demands humungous reserves to function. Today doesn’t matter, in only one to two generations time everything today will be forgotten or insignificant of the issues of the time.
I wouldn't bank on it.
The USA has huge sums of capital to throw at nuclear, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal, wind, etc. and ample places to put them.
They'll progress to full electrification quickly enough to maintain their empire. Worth keeping in mind that they only need to produce enough for their ~350m population.
we have more than enough -- forget the high quality coal we no longer produce -- or the oil we no longer refine -- the wind solar hydro and geothermal potential is almost unlimited and could meet all our needs several times over - and in the long run will be way more efficient and cost effective -- if we had any vision and leadership A government would invest heavily in an infrastructure stake!
Remember, the object of the Labour/Greens is to make everyone poor and dependent on the Govt for handouts. Being unable to afford electricity is part of the plan. Thats the real reason Labour shut down the Low User Plans and forced everyone to pay more. Because then you will vote for them because they promise a "winter energy payment" benefit. Ditto for all the jobs lost in regional areas - more beneficiaries, more Labour/Greens voters. Its a feature, not a bug.
I just saw a National Party post on my Facebook feed.
You could be eligible to claim up to 25% of your ECE fees back with FamilyBoost. If your household income is up to $180,000, that’s up to $975 every three months to help cover the costs.
Could say National want to keep everyone poor too, so they can promise a rebate for families having more children than they can afford.
I struggle to see how anyone can be blaming the issues with our power markets solely on Labour.
They probably could have made better decisions in this sector but all the major moves that are now having negative consequences on our power market are the direct result of National Party policies. There is no incentive for lower power prices when the gentailers benefit from the status quo at the expense of everything else.
Power prices started going through the roof in 2018 when the oil and gas exploration ban was implemented. This is not a recent problem but has been years in the making. There is a graph showing the price rises over the last 6 years in the Herald article. Its utterly ridiculous to sugges that this is the fault of the National Govt.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/what-went-wrong-in-the-electrici…
According to data kept by the regulator, the Electricity Authority, average futures prices have risen dramatically since 2018, the year of the offshore oil and gas exploration ban.
Data going back to 2009 shows remarkably stable or even falling prices for electricity futures. In mid-2009, the forward price curve, showing the price for power delivered in a year or more’s time cost about $79/MWh. For the next 10 years prices stayed low and stable; the average futures price never cracked $92/MWh and fell as low as $71/MWh.
Industrial power users were getting real-terms price cuts as inflation slowly eroded the real price of their futures contracts. Things began to change in September 2018, when prices began their slow, seemingly inexorable rise. Within a year they had cracked $100/MWh, by 2021 they hit $130/MWh and earlier this year they hit $208/MWh, with some futures prices settling even higher.
Here's a chart, filtered from 2015 to now. Might take a while to load, so here's a screenshot -> https://ibb.co/QPp9TTW
We've had the biggest spot electricity spot prices under the current coalition. If K.W. thinks the spike we had in 2018 is "through the roof" (it was the only the month of October) then I'd be keen to hear what their definition is of the last 5 months of wholesale prices.
https://www.emi.ea.govt.nz/Wholesale/Reports/W_P_C?DateFrom=20151005&Da…
LOL. You said: "Power prices started going through the roof in 2018 when the oil and gas exploration ban was implemented. "
I said prove it.
You provide a graph showing the spikes associated 'dry years' with the price returning to normal in between which has absolutely NOTHING to do with your assertion BUT has everything to do with our gentailers not investing further generation assets.
Want to have another go? :-)
I do blame Labour.
When they had the chance, instead of being "girl's blouses" and pandering to (the rich's) vested interests, they should have corrected the balance, and damn the consequences!
Structural change needs will and courage. And leadership. And a clear and succinct communication strategy.
With none of those .... We'll succumb to "getting back on track" so the mega-wealthy turn NZ into their playground. (That's the National Party's policy by the way ... Rely on dumb voters ... They'll deliver to what rich people want.)
Labour are directly responsible for agreeing to the elimination of the low user tariff & increased fixed daily charges at the behest of the generators & with the connivance of MBIE.
Enabling consumers billing, gentailer profits & govt dividends to move more to fixed from variable
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natural-resourc…
not true but the reason is quite interesting. As more renewables go in the need to invest and expand the grid increases because this fluctuating power supply needs to be moved around a lot. this needs to be paid for somehow and is what is making electricity so expensive. rooftop solar is the worst. people get paid to push their worthless high peak time power back into the grid. if the grid operators don't get some brakes, they will go bankrupt.
....power companies paid out $10.8 billion in dividends over the last decade but invested $4.5b in new power projects.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/504764/big-power-companies-paying-l…
Half of those dividends and high corporate taxes on those super-profits went into government coffers and some of that went into Winter Energy Payments so back into the corporate earnings of the gentailers.
This is stupid economics where we keep paying a cartload of bean counters to circulate money instead of putting it into new generation assets.
Its all good. At least we are not the UK with the highest electricitiy prices in the world. Although the power companies will probably see UK prices as a goal to be achieved, not avoided.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burdened-most-e…
Residential UK users pay NZD 57c per kWh
Compared to US users who pay NZD 14c per kWh and China users who pay NZD 12c per kWh
Guess where all the industrial businesses (and jobs) will be moving to?
The US has cheap power prices partly thanks to natural gas being a waste product from producing shale oil, as well as the enormous economies of scale that come from having the world's largest oil industry. Anyone comparing us to them hasn't put a lot of critical thinking into why their electricity prices are cheaper than ours. And as Morepork has said above China's electricity market is so different there is little to no point comparing us to them.
Our advantage should be coming from our hydroelectric capacity and renewables, but thanks to our broken electricity market with completely backwards incentives we aren't able to make use of these natural competitive advantages to help our economy and instead end up paying way more for power to the detriment of us all.
The recent snow is probably more relevant going into next year, than the recent rain.
The snow pack counts as an extra "lake".
Short term , an agreement with methanex over peak use would help .
Lng is a terrible idea, it would be better to store lpg, and either convert a peaker station to lpg, or stop lpg production in the winter peak.
Longer term the renewables are way cheaper, the exploration ban has no effect whatsoever, and reversing it even less.
NZ should not plan for any LNG terminal to be available as early as 2026. It is not practical unless you ignore safe marine practice, not viable unless someone gets their numbers wrong, and could not be commissioned before winter 2028 unless it is a very dodgy setup.
And our government's solution to this problem is .... [crickets].
I'd remind everyone that the National Party set up this market.
And it was that National Party that sold of the our big gentailers so under the guise of 'competition' the gentailers could control the supply and therefore pricing.
NZ used to have the lowest electricity prices in the developed world which gave NZ Inc a competitive advantage. The National Party sold it.
And the National Party's plan to 'get us back on track'? ... Build more roads, corporate welfare, and play lapdog to whatever the scoundrel gentailers recommend as a 'solution'.
Man alive. We're as dumb as dirt. Probably dumber.
If the Commerce Commission randomly prevents the 'Scheme of Arrangement' whereby Contact Energy has agreed to buy electricity generator Manawa then, to be consistent, it would have to make the Government sell down its controlling interest in Meridian, Mercury, and Genesis to the extent that it is no longer the majority shareholder in those companies; would they have the b*lls to do that?
TP Risk model also has the assumption that the TCC closes this year (which it will) as Contacts 2nd Geothermal unit ( Tehuka 3 51.4 MW) starts on Monday,The additional 210 MW will reduce demand on Hydro,and additional peaking capacity of 100 MW comes back at Stratford in Nov.
Renewable assets coming back from outage are 44MW of wind in October,2 MW wind in Nov,and 128MW of hydro in Dec.Along with a full 600 MW of Solar (DG and farm) up and running by Dec,there will be constraints on need for FF over summer/autumn and reduced demand on Hydro as EA rules now require solar/wind to be despatched first.
No tinkering will address the issue that the NZ electricity market is fatally flawed.
a) Generators are paid for scarcity. There is zero incentive to spend expensive capital to add generation.
b) All generators are paid the price of the highest cost generator in any supply period. This is the absurdity of trying to run power generation as a market when c) has not been addressed.
c) Successive govts have failed to address the dry year issue. The market wont do it.
d) The govt as major shareholder in most of the generators takes massive dividends and taxes, while businesses go to the wall due to exorbitant dry period power prices.
e) Separation of generators and retailers will only help a little while there is a dry period problem.
f) Thanks National & Max Bradford for completely screwing up the NZ electricity system.
"d" : when the partial privatisation started the first act of the generation companies was to change the Depreciation basis from historical cost (funded by generations of NZdrs) to replacement cost estimates - thereby massively increasing their profits & dividends for the Govt.
interesting the businesses blaming the high energy costs for their closing -- having travelled recently in South America - - seeing fields of solar powered stations powering orchards and vineyards -- factories roofed in solar panels -- I wonder if any of these companies considered the benifits of investing in their own power generation...
Likewise what did they do to reduce their energy consumption - and become more sustainable -
Just spit balling, but would it not make sense to heavily subsidise Solar installs on housing to take the pressure off the national grid. It could be a limited time, say 18 months.
Could make a sizeable difference in a very short time. Major power projects take years sometimes decades.
More power generation, means less power needing to be generated by other means. So hydro lakes could be kept fuller. (that is apparently one of the major issues at the moment, low lakes)
Also our prices have just gone up for lines transmission because of the ned to build new transmission infrustrature. Less would need to be invested if there is a lot of domestic solar installations especially if houses also use power batteries to go with the solar.
It should be fairly predictable shouldn't it?
Short term weather forecasts are pretty good these days. So regionally we should know the amount of wind, the amount of cloud cover and have a pretty good estimate of what is going to be generated by these means and what the shortfall might be?
The "unreliables" are actually pretty predictable. Offshore wind would be even more reliable.
Been an island nation , we always have the sea to land (and V. V) wind twice a day. Because land and water heat / cool at different rates. I guess you could say this may be overridden by a frontal wind , but you still got wind either way .
There is a misconception that solar produces nothing in winter. On a clear winters day the panels can pump , as they produce more power when cold. Add in the edge of cloud effect , and even cloudy days can produce good power. Yes a week of overcast weather will reduce it to nearly zero , but thanks to our windy conditions , not too common.
You are wrong SB. Electricity has to be generated to match load on a second by second basis and in that solar is totally unpredictable, even in the one trading period ahead model. Go onto the electricity grid map and you can see that it was 47MW at 12:35 and 21MW at 12:45. Even that is with data smoothing. Wind is not as bad its dropouts are over half hour of more periods.
There are a lot of silly and I'll informed comments in here.
that issue is squarely government policy and social norms. fossil fuel energy development has been shunned for many years and outright banned. nuclear is off the table and a pumped hydro solution has hung around preventing any new generator risking and entrance.
if lake Onslow had gone ahead and was supported by wind and solar, we would be paying over $0.50 a kilowatt hour and have no industry. but don't worry, we can be happy for awhile making coffee and selling each other houses.
If the often-repeated "Lake Onslow chilling effect" was actually a real effect "preventing any new generator", it could only do it by having an ability to offer power into the market at a lower cost than from renewables. But wind and sun are free. Onslow power (when generating) could never compete against renewable power because it would have to offer its power at a price at least sufficient to recover pumping costs.
However, it could still reduce wholesale power prices by being the marginal price setter in the market in place of coal or gas. This is presumably why the gentailers have always been so opposed the Lake Onslow scheme. It's not as if they developed a sudden concern over how taxpayer dollars are spent.
The Onslow scheme would in fact have a "warming effect" for new renewables because, when pumping, it would set a market floor price when wind and solar are abundant. This would give reduced payback times for new wind and solar generation.
Also, there is no evidence that the Onslow scheme being under consideration actually had any negative impact on new renewable proposals:
https://www.thepost.co.nz/business/350406660/fact-check-was-lake-onslow…
What did have a chilling effect on new renewables was the uncertainty for a long time about whether the Tiwai smelter would remain, with the risk that a significant dump of cheap Manapouri power might come onto the market.
Earl
You have little or no understanding of power station economics and you continue to show it.
For wind and solar, their cost of fuel might be zero but they have significant O&M costs. To this has to be added grid balancing charges which for high penetration would be massive. SA is the best example of that.
Onslow was a dog and the government pushing it crippled investment. Even if it could have been built for the stated price and no transmission upgrades were needed (both highly improbable), it would have needed $1M a day profit on arbitrage just to pay off the interest on construction cost. At the theoretical max load factor of 40%, that is $80/MWh. Realistic load factor would be less than 10% so charges be ridiculously high. It would make Whirinaki on diesel look cheap. That could be why South Australia has to regularly fire up their diesel engines to save them from blackout - that and saving politicians who promote green policies because they believe laws of parliament override the laws of physics.
South Australia 's negative pricing was actually caused by not been able to turn off coal fired power stations. Solar farms can , and did, instantly shut down. So too did wind farms.Un managed domestic roof top solar was more of a problem.
While more storage is the best solution, over building solar may become the cheaper solution there. Of course they would have to do away with baseload coal plants, and move to gas peaker plants, for nighttime generation.
SB
You are totally wrong, how unusual. SA has not had any coal fired stations for years. The dynamited Northerns boilers in a spectacular display before their power cuts. AEMO dictates the GTs have to stay on to provide inerti and voltage control, which none of the unreliables do. Even batteries don't do that function. They have negative pricing to get wind and grid solar to switch off as they can't export it. This is because of the subsidised household solar. swamps middle of the day
https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/solar-farm-output-wastage-tops-99p…
OK, so it's says national coal fired stations. Are you saying SA is not connected to the national grid?
You still are wrong. SA is only loosely connected to the rest of the eastern Oz grid, mainly through the regularly load constrained Heywoods double circuit. That is why they regularly have episodes like this2024-09-23-at-19-00-nemwatch-savolatility.jpg (2560×1525) (wattclarity.com.au) where the lignite stations in the Latrobe Valley have to bail them out - at the same time as impoverishing their power cosumers
Good to see an old adversary again from years back Chris. I can't remember when we had our first exchange in Energy News - maybe 2020? I seem to recall back then you were certain that the rise and fall of Onslow water level was going to cause massive landslides.
I least we are both happy to use our real names. I guess others have their reasons for not doing that.
But I'm confused about why you want to stick with repeating your old "fag packet" argument over arbitrage when we have been through it all before. If the cost of Onslow was going to be paid off by purchasing electricity at low price and selling high .. how long would it take to pay off the construction cost? Maybe 1000 years? I don't think anyone has ever suggested that the Onslow scheme is to be viewed in terms of "power station economics". The example I like to use is considering the business economics of building a single hospital. The hospital would never be built as a stand-alone business entity if a calculation was made over how much the patients would have to be charged in order for the its construction cost to be paid back in reasonable time. The hospital, like Onslow (if it was deemed desirable), would be a national good paid by the government for the good of all.
Onslow remains a possibility now as much as it ever was. There is no way the next change of government (a Labour-Green coalition) is not going to look at it again. The investors out there will all know that. But there is still a proliferation of new wind and solar projects that have put in for fast-track consenting. So Onslow can't be having too much of a chilling effect.
That's not to say that Lake Onslow pumped storage would or should go ahead - it may well be considered too expensive by any measure. But the possibility remains as of right now. If you were looking for holding-back of renewables - the previous uncertainty over Tiwai is the obvious cause.
I know you have a certain disdain for renewable generation - "the unreliables" as you like to call them. For sure, intermittent generation is unreliable by definition. Moving in that direction without massive storage makes no sense when we are vulnerable to dry years. Phantom gas fields are not going to help. I hope we can find a lot of geothermal.
One strange aspect about the Onslow scheme is that a lot of people hold very strong views one way or the other. If Interest would let me write an "article" consisting of nothing more than a title "Pumped storage at Lake Onslow", there would quickly be a large number of comments to follow. I guess that's a good thing.
Onslow earnings are a red herring Chris. If it never earned anything at all, it would still serve as a valuable insurance for NZ Inc. That's how it will be evaluated after the government changes - hopefully in 2026. After consideration, the cost may or may not be considered to be worth its value to the economy. Let's wait for the government to change and see how it goes.
"This is presumably why the gentailers have always been so opposed the Lake Onslow scheme. It's not as if they developed a sudden concern over how taxpayer dollars are spent." Perhaps they were shocked by the scale of your pet project - that you have been pushing since 2002?
"Enerlytica analyst John Kidd said the “sheer scale” of the proposed scheme had left the industry shell-shocked.
At 5000GWh, Lake Onslow would be capable of storing about the same amount of energy as all the country’s existing hydro schemes combined."
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/122319866/4-billion-lake-onslow-pumped…
I think the gentailers were also concerned about the possibility of the Onslow scheme being operated in an unpredictable way by some future government. It's a pity that the previous government didn't make a clear statement that the Onslow scheme would just be another player in the market, if it went ahead. In that context, pumped storage at Lake Onslow would have a smoothing effect, but certainly not "standing the market on its head". A report that includes Onslow's influence in the market can downloaded at
https://pce.parliament.nz/media/lnrayjcz/the-economics-of-four-future-e…
The Lake Onslow scheme was suggested as a dry year possibility by the Interim Climate Change Committee. I had no prior knowledge they were looking at it. They may have been attracted by the scheme having up to 5 TWh storage capacity - seen as the worst dry year hydro deficit to prepare for.
Earl , would Lake Onslow have benefited from the recent rain? Was modelling done on possible future climate changing weather patterns. I know you can't conflate one storm to a change in climate , but watching indepth weather reports , I do think patterns are changing.
It would have benefitted for sure solardb, in the sense that the rapid recovery of lake levels helped to create a big reduction in wholesale electricity prices. Onslow (if it had been operating) would then have changed from from generating mode to pumping mode, taking advantage of the lowered prices.
As you say, not much can be deduced from a single storm event. It's worth having a read of a recent paper by one of my former students, Jen Purdie. Climate change in the hydro catchments is anticipated to cause an increased discharge from the hydro lakes. However, she suggests that this would not result in increased hydro power output because the greater frequency of higher lake levels would just result in more spill losses. This is where the Onslow scheme would help. There is a rough inverse relation between hydro lake levels and electricity prices. Before the lakes got to highest levels, Onslow would be pumping with water being released from the hydro lakes to provide the power. By keeping the lakes away more often from their highest levels, we would get an electricity gain from climate change by getting more power from the increased flows into the hydro lakes.
I am wondering if enhancing biomass(woodchips etc) with a fossil fuel , to bring it up to a similar heat value to coal , would work at Huntly, or a new build station(or Whirinaki?) .
Something like 80% biomass mixed with 20% diesel , or a wood fired fire with a gas jet to bring up to temperature.
An old mate of mine used to have a mechanisim that dripped used vegetable oil into his woodfire , reduced smoke and the amount of wood he had to burn by a larger amount than you would expect from a few litres of vegetable oil .
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262923271_Biomass_Fuel_Utiliza…
"The three low-rainfall years of 2001, 2008 and 2012/13 required in total 3,200 GWh of additional generation to address the “dry-year” issue ...If Huntly power station had been operated purely in security of supply service mode for that period it would have been used only three times, i.e., run 24/7 for three months on two 250 MW units to supplement hydro.
...An 11 PJ store of torrefied wood fuel would require 20 enclosed silos 25 metres diameter and 75 metres high to protect it from the weather. The risk of spontaneous combustion of the stored processed fuel, might require nitrogen flooding. This use of the existing asset of Huntly power station would be much cheaper than ~$4 [now $15!] billion for Lake Onslow."
They have this at Mt.Maunganui.guess what it has been used for recently?
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