Fishing News index > January 2007

Getting the NZ Energy Strategy Right is Important for Rivers

Submissions on a draft Energy Strategy for New Zealand close at the end of the month. The strategy attempts to deal with big and complex questions – how to provide secure clean power at affordable prices while responding to climate change and tackling carbon emissions. But the strategy focuses on energy supply – where to get more power from - rather than looking at management of energy demand.

Curiously, the issue of energy efficiency and conservation is dealt with in a companion strategy rather than as a central plank of the energy strategy itself. New Zealand’s efforts to conserve energy are modest at best and they need to be ramped up significantly.

Fish and Game’s primary interest is in electricity and one of the concerns with the strategy is the heavy emphasis on future use of renewable energy sources for electricity generation – hydro, wind, geothermal - ahead of fossil fuels such as coal.

Our view is that New Zealand has already used enough of its rivers for power generation. What remain should be left alone. Yet there is considerable interest in the development of more rivers – the Nevis, the Gowan, the lower Waitaki, the Wairau, and the Arnold and the Hurinui – and that is just those in the South Island. This interest is being bolstered by the classification of hydro as a renewable energy source when free flowing rivers are very much a finite resource. If they were plants or animals those that remain would probably fall somewhere between ‘threatened’ and ‘endangered’!

The strategy needs to recognize that NZ is over-dependent on hydro power with about 60% generated from that source and needs to balance up its supply from other sources in order to increase security of supply. Wind power offers significant potential energy production but wind farms in the south of the South Island wont always make sense when much of the increasing demand is in the north. Transmission loss is a major inefficiency in the present system so it makes sense to site sources of supply as close as possible to end users.

Managing energy demand is important as well. At present energy use and economic growth are strongly linked but New Zealand has some choices in this area. Does the country really want to provide a home for multinational companies engaged in energy intensive activities? Aluminium smelting and cement production are two examples of industries that gobble up power and put pressure on for more energy development.

The NZ business Council for Sustainability identifies this link between energy use and economic growth as an issue and suggests a ‘decoupling’ of the two as one way forward but notes that to achieve that we’ll need a significant transformation in the structure of the New Zealand economy. If that transformation meant the dairy industry moved away from intensive production of low value milk products to environmentally kinder production of higher value products, anglers could be faced with one of those mythical win-win situations -less pressure for development of rivers for hydro power and less non-point source pollution!