Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): Thank you Mr Speaker for the promotion. Let me be absolutely clear about the time line of what happened on Monday. At 6.43 a.m. in the morning Transpower issued a low residual notice to participants in the electricity market. This is an absolutely routine notice—absolutely routine notice to generators—and is part of their daily forecasting as to what is going on. No one would ever pick up a phone to a Minister at that stage. Later on in the day at 1:02 p.m. Transpower issued another warning that there was insufficient generation coming in for the evening peak. Again interesting. Nothing that anyone would pick up a phone for the Minister to—why? Because the market ought to have solved this problem.By the evening another warning was issued at 5.07 p.m. and it was time to get more serious at that stage. Perhaps someone should have picked up the phone at that stage. At 6.40 p.m. Transpower issued a request for network companies with a direct grid connection to shed load by 1 percent. Finally at 7.10 p.m. there was a grid emergency notice issued. If ever there was a point to pick up the phone to the Minister that is when it should have happened. It did not—it did not. In fact at 7.54 p.m. Transpower sent an email to the Minister—an email.So whatever happened there was a failure of communication which Transpower has already apologised for—has already apologised for. People are putting into place systems to make sure it does not happen again. But let me go back to a critical point about what happened on Monday night. On Monday night there was enough capacity in the system to generate the power that was needed. This was not a failure of the entire system to be able to generate enough power. The capacity was there. The problem was that it was not used and 28000 households ended up without power and without power in the central North Island which at this time of year is one of the colder places in the country. I've been in Taumarunui on a winter night and it is not a warm place to be.So let me run through some of the known problems that caused the fact that we had an outage. Here are the known problems: the third Rankine turbine at Huntly was not fired up. If it had been fired up when that first notice came through there would have been enough power generation in the evening. Even when the second warning came through at 1:02 p.m. if it had been fired up when the second warning came through—now that turbine takes between six to 10 hours to fire up. Perhaps it might not have been online on time but perhaps it might have. So the situation could have been saved at that stage.So we need to have a think about why that decision was made not to fire the turbine up. Now it turns out that Genesis made a commercial decision in that regard. That is because of the way—or an operational decision—the market rules are set. Perhaps we need to have a look at those. The fact is there was a problem of that turbine not being fired up and we need to know why it happened and fix that problem.The second problem: there was weed in Lake Rotoaira in the Tongariro scheme. Now ordinarily it's kept clear of the intake in that scheme but as it happened there was a south-east gale all that day which pushed the weed into the intake. As it even turned out the workers in that scheme actually had it under control until about alas just before the evening peak just exactly when we needed it to be clear. So something went wrong with the way that the weeds are controlled—normally it's OK but it couldn't cope that particular day.There was a third problem. We know that Transpower actually got some of the calculations wrong. So some of the information that was sent through to some of the retailers in terms of how much power they needed to shed was actually incorrect. Now stuff happens—stuff happens. This was a mistake and it wasn't picked up and it resulted in those 28000 households being without power. Again something needs to be taken into account there and investigated.So in terms of those things those problems those are all problems but where were the actual failures—the failures? Was it in the electricity market? Well the market delivered a market solution. The trouble is it was not the supply solution we needed. It was not the social solution we needed which was for all our households to be warm and to have the electricity on one of the coldest nights of the year. So the set-up in the electricity system does not deliver the solutions we need. This is why Governments need to intervene.There was a communications failure—there was a communications failure. Transpower did not alert the Minister in time and there were further communications failures. We know that many of those people those 28000 households were saying that if they had just had a few minutes warning they could have prepared a bit better. That's a very good point. So there was a failure there. But above all I think the failure that the Opposition have tried to sheet home is they have tried to say it is a Government failure. That is false. It is a failure on the part of the Minister." they said.You know we had some absurdities from the Opposition. Barbara Kuriger suggested that she had known about it from social media so why was the Minister not on social media in the evening? What a ridiculous thing to say. For goodness' sakes! Social media. Then she said "Well why wasn't the Minister talking to the State-owned enterprises Minister in the evening?" Well actually the State-owned enterprises Minister didn't know either because Transpower had not picked up the phone so there was an impossibility there. Then the next one was why wasn't the Minister reading her email at 7.54 p.m. at night? We know the volume of email that comes into our inboxes and we know that a Minister's email is monitored by staff. Staff go home in the evenings; it's an entirely reasonable thing to do. So the Minister's email would not have been monitored at 7.54 in the evening and I suggest that again this goes back to the appropriateness of using email for an emergency situation. For goodness' sakes! I'm surprised the Opposition wasn't asking why the Minister wasn't recalculating Transpower's load calculations and sending out warnings there. I'm surprised they didn't ask why she wasn't cleaning out the weed in Lake Rotoaira.The point is defined here where action needs to be taken and simply bellowing that it must be the Minister's fault ignores the realities of our system—the realities out of our system—that meant that we had a power outage that we had households suffering through that evening. We do need to locate those failures in the system that night and we've got two inquiries under way. One is the routine regular statutory inquiry that Transpower will run. One is the one which has been commissioned from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment finding out what went wrong what can be done better and putting better systems in place. The Ministers are doing exactly what they should be doing taking responsibility for what they can fix and getting it under way.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed."