Hague Kevin: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Hague Kevin: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:665;Page:12705] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Chair. Tena koe te Whare. Tena koutou e hoa ma. The previous speaker mentioned the Government’s draft New Zealand Energy Strategy and I thought I might begin with that point also. Perhaps the strategy is unkindly criticised by the  
New Zealand Herald 
 
which talks about its lack of detail and content. Probably the  
New Zealand Herald  
has not understood that the strategy is one of those aspirational strategies that talk in a hand-wavy kind of way about goals without actually including any content about how we might achieve those goals. 
I want to talk about two of the gaps. This draft strategy says nothing about energy planning. It says nothing about how much energy is needed where we need it and when. The other gap I want to talk about is the fact that it says nothing about the necessary and now urgent reform that we require in electricity generation and in particular in decision making about electricity generation. I think it was Shakespeare who said: “There is a tide in the affairs of men” and I think we would agree probably at least in our party—and I am sure that other parties around the Chamber would agree—that perhaps the tide has now completely gone out on the idea that decisions about essential infrastructure for New Zealand can be left to the free market. Yet in electricity generation we still have the flotsam and jetsam of the free-market zeal of the 1980s and 1990s; it is actually still dominating this part of the energy sector. 
In my shadow portfolios I talk to a lot of communities around the country about electricity issues and I come across two things: communities with really great ideas about electricity generation that they cannot get off the ground and electricity generation ideas from the big power companies that are steadfastly opposed by communities. So there are two different problems there. 
Most people support the idea that we ought in electricity generation to make decisions from the perspective of the public good. They think that if we know how much electricity generation we need we can identify all the options for generating electricity and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each from the point of view of the public good. They are astonished to learn that what we actually do bears no resemblance at all to that. Instead we have no plan for how much energy is needed and where. 
Instead we have only those proposals from the big companies that get advanced into the resource consent decision-making process and there is a “first come first served” basis for that decision making. We have no ability to compare schemes. This is all counter-intuitive; none of it is what we would do if we were approaching electricity generation from the public-good perspective. It is a process that is virtually guaranteed to produce suboptimal outcomes. It will never result in conservation schemes to match supply and demand and it will never result in the small-scale distributed generation that is almost certainly the best option for New Zealand. 
By chance the public has the opportunity to compare two schemes on the West Coast of the South Island. Either of these schemes would be sufficient to produce self-sufficiency for the West Coast. There is a scheme promoted by Hydro Developments that would take the acid-polluted water from the Stockton Plateau drop it to sea level discharge it out to sea and have a net positive environmental impact. 
The Hydro Developments scheme is being opposed in the Environment Court by two State-owned enterprises Meridian Energy and Solid Energy. Both of those companies seem to have pretty spurious reasons for opposing the scheme and I am inclined to suspect that it may be to do with their interests in their own generation schemes. It is both scandalous and unethical behaviour on the part of State-owned enterprises. 
Meridian Energy’s scheme by way of contrast would flood 300 hectares of pristine public conservation land the largest-ever inundation of conservation land in New Zealand history. It exemplifies the set of values that we see again and again.