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Labour and the Greens call it a tax. The coalition Government calls it a levy. We call it a forced investment into an old technology that's not needed.Rewiring Aotearoa CEO and Electric Orchardist Mike Casey explained the absurd decision to build a new Liquified Natural Gas terminal on Breakfast and it boils down to this: it is set to be an investment "north of a billion dollars" that locks us into another volatile foreign molecule subscription. All electricity users will be forced pay a fee to fund it (but not gas users). And "if we're lucky", households will see a decrease of $50 a year.
'Downward pressure,' a phrase the Government and the energy industry likes to use to show it's doing something, does not guarantee bills will go down, as we have seen over time. Gas often sets the price of electricity and LNG is a more expensive variety of gas, so, as Marc Daalder writes in Newsroom, it's how it gets used that counts.
Rooftop solar, on the other hand, offers households thousands of dollars of savings each year, including loan repayments. Combine more of that on homes, farms and businesses with lots more grid-scale solar, wind and geothermal to keep water in the hydro lakes, better use of our existing domestic gas reserves for businesses that really need it, and, if we're desperate, coal and diesel (which is hopefully not needed if we build enough), and we have a much better solution to our dry year issue.
Could reframing energy independence as a national security issue, rather than a climate one, be our best chance to go electric? The Spinoff collects a range of views from various commentators like Liam Dann, Pattrick Smellie and Joel McManus and shows that it has clearly got the attention of the media and should be getting the attention of our politicians.
Read moreDownload"There is quite a lot of talk about EV price depreciation and resale value, but we are not really talking about petrol car price depreciation. In the next five years or so, we may start to see a big game of petrol car hot potato, first between New Zealanders, and then between other countries." That was Mike Casey writing in Newsroom in January last year but, after the current crisis, it might happen more quickly than expected.
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