Fitzsimons Jeanette: Standing Orders—Suspension 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Standing Orders—Suspension 
[Volume:622;Page:17328] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Parliament this afternoon is being asked to suspend the Standing Orders in order to smooth the path of New Zealand’s next “think big” project and it will not surprise anybody that the Greens will not vote for that. This may look like a rather small amendment to the Electricity Act to allow big power lines to cross roads but it is part of a much bigger suite of measures—some of which we understand will be revealed tomorrow when the Resource Management Act amendment is tabled in the House—to facilitate a totally unnecessary totally unsustainable and totally unjust 400 kilovolt ampere transmission line imposed on the whole length of the country and on the people who live underneath it. 
It is totally unnecessary because there are many other ways of making sure that the lights stay on in Auckland—and I will go into those later. It is totally unjust because it will interfere with the quality of life the health and the property values of many people on the route. It is totally unsustainable because if this line is built it will undermine everything this Government has been trying to do in sustainable energy in terms of energy efficiency distributed generation renewables and a sustainable future. 
So let us look first of all at what it is. This 400 kilovolt ampere line will be far bigger than any transmission line we currently have in the country. The towers are planned to be 70 metres high; that is three times higher than the largest we have anywhere and is more than 20 storeys high. The initial stage of it is just the 200 kilometres from Whakamaru to Auckland but the long-term plan is for it to traverse the whole of the country. That 200 kilometres affects 1400 people who live underneath that line. The lines will go directly over people’s houses. The towers will stand in their gardens and on their farms. The electromagnetic field caused by that very much more powerful line will create a much greater health risk. Science is still divided about the health risks from electromagnetic fields but quite a number of countries require there to be a 100 metre - wide strip underneath high-tension power lines where there are no houses because there is quite a lot of evidence accumulating about increased risk of cancer and particularly things like leukaemia for people who live near them. We ought to take a precautionary approach until more of that science is known. 
This little amendment will actually prevent the councils that control those roads from protecting the health of their communities by asking for additional protections to what currently exists and what they can do for the 110 kilovolt ampere lines. Well people are getting organised and the Government and Transpower will find that it will not be an easy line to drive through the Waikato and south Auckland. It goes through some rather well-heeled and well-organised sections of the community who are already getting organised. 
OK but do we have to do this just to keep the lights on in Auckland? Auckland is short of power we all know so do we have to sacrifice 1400 people in order to make sure that Auckland gets its electricity? Well the news I have today is that this power line does not produce a single kilowatt of electricity. It is just a pipe along which we send things. So that line will not do anything for Auckland until somebody builds large generating stations away to the south and then loses a lot of that power in transferring it along lines on the way to Auckland. 
This is yesterday’s technology. This will keep us in the 1950s. The new technology where energy systems are moving worldwide is towards small power stations built close to demand distributed generation energy efficiency load shifting and load management. Those are the ways of the future. That is Government policy under its sustainable energy policy and it is turning its back on it with this crazy project. So it will take half a billion dollars just for that 200 kilometres which will have no effect until somebody builds massive new coal-fired power stations on the South Island lignite fields and then sends that electricity along the wires. 
What alternatives are there? The first thing to note is that the power lines we have now are inadequate only at peak hour—that is between 4 and 7 on a winter afternoon. So all we have to do is find some alternatives that deal with power between 4 and 7 on a winter afternoon in Auckland and the existing lines will do for quite a lot longer. They can also be upgraded themselves to carry a higher capacity than they have without having to build that new monstrosity. 
So what could we do to deal with the peak? There are a number of smaller generation options that could be built close to Auckland. There are some good wind sites there and to cope with the variability of wind there could be diesel sets in Auckland that come on only during the top of the peak when the wind is not blowing. So there could be a complementarity there with just occasional back-up from a diesel set and a wind farm for the rest of the time. There are a number of other options for generation that we could build around Auckland. 
Let us look at the supply side of things. What is it that people are doing between 4 and 7 on winter afternoons? They are cooking their dinner and turning on their heating. We can do both of those things perfectly well with gas. Gas is used far more efficiently directly than it is through power stations so if we shifted some of the load of households for cooking and space heating on to gas in Auckland we could lop that electricity load in the winter afternoons. There are a lot of things that we can do to shift industrial load off-peak by giving people tariff incentives to have their peak demand at a time when the lines do have capacity rather than at a time when they do not. Then there is the whole demand side of energy efficiency. A complete lighting retrofit up to cost-effective levels of efficiency right through Auckland would make those lines unnecessary for a long time. Anything that we can do to improve the efficiency of our lighting and heating in Auckland and Northland will create more capacity on the lines. 
So here we are. The Government has an energy efficiency and conservation strategy that requires us to improve our efficiency by 2 percent each year. That target it seems is not being met. The Government has a target for new renewables which tend to come in small packages spread around the country. It has a target to meet our Kyoto objective and therefore to use all our energy more efficiently. But what is it planning to do? It is planning to panic about the electricity situation in Auckland. It wants to go back to the old technology of the 1950s to impose those gigantic monstrosities on the landscape the environment the health the homes and the properties of 1400 people between Whakamaru and Auckland and in doing so to completely undermine its whole strategy of taking us into a new era of energy where it is used more efficiently where it comes from renewables and where we have enough. The Green Party will not support this.