Tisch Lindsay: Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill — Third Reading 
Tisch Lindsay: Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill — Third Reading 
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LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako) 
: 
 I am not Sandra Goudie but I am happy to take up the remaining 7 minutes of her call. The speech she was making was very important and I want to draw the attention of the House to the absolute risk that will be associated with the Wellington Regional Council— 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I apologise for interrupting the member but my understanding of the Standing Orders is that if a member is not here to take the call then a new call is granted and that member has a full 10 minutes. I am not aware that a member can have the 7 remaining minutes of another member’s speech. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: No. The member can transfer the call to another member of his or her party. That is quite correct. 
LINDSAY TISCH 
: I was not going to speak for 10 minutes so I thank Mr Shirley for the opportunity to allow me to speak for 10 minutes— 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: The member has 7 minutes. 
LINDSAY TISCH 
: I will just take the remaining 7 minutes. I want to make the point very clearly that this Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill will put at risk the community in which that local authority operates. What we will see is a move under the powers of general competence which came in under the Local Government Act of 2002 to put the onus on the ratepayers of this area if the council moves into a commercial venture and the venture goes belly-up. Who will carry the can? It will be the ratepayers of this area be they those on fixed incomes superannuitants or others. So who will pay if anything goes wrong? 
We said during the Committee stage of this bill and I mentioned it when I spoke in the second reading debate that that was a major concern we had. The bill allows of course for the regional council to move into the energy field and in particular into the field of renewable energy sources. Energy and roading have been identified many times as the major infrastructural challenges facing New Zealand. So we have an issue and a challenge with energy but we must also realise that the costs to be incurred could be very very severe indeed if something were to go wrong. 
I want to spend my time looking specifically at wind-power generation and wind turbines. Members will know that those turbines are a blight on the landscape if they have seen them. If they have been through the United States and have seen the wind farms there as I have they will know that they can be quite an eyesore. We have the challenge in the Waikato area of Transpower wanting to put pylons through our region that are up to 70 metres high which will also be a blight on the landscape. However in terms of wind turbines I believe that their towers will also be quite an eyesore. 
The efficiency of wind farms is not as great as many people might expect. In fact they can operate only when the wind blows between 5 kilometres and 25 kilometres an hour. They are very expensive to operate they have huge maintenance costs they are noisy and they are an eyesore. I have seen them in operation. I was in Australia in November looking at a wind operation there and I learnt that they are hugely expensive to operate. So at best they can be only complementary to the other sources of energy we normally have be they geothermal hydro—of which we have an abundance—or coal. I am not going to go into those sources in particular but I want to draw the House’s attention to an article that appeared in the  
Dominion Post  
today headed up: “Generation fluctuations put strain on national grid”. 
I want to quote from that article because it sends out some challenges in relation to wind generation: “Wind-generated power is putting more pressure on New Zealand’s already strained national grid. A study by State-owned national grid company Transpower shows that fluctuations in the amount of power generated by big Manawatuwindfarms affect the loading of transmission circuits. With Meridian Energy’s Te Apitiwindfarm and TrustPower’s Tararua farm both now working Transpower found that 100 megawatt (MW) increases in generation from rising winds could occur in any one five-minute trading period potentially causing imbalances in the system and affecting the quality of power received by consumers. Building more windfarms”—and this is a point to bear in mind in relation to what Wellington Regional Council might want to do—“along the Tararua Range as planned could double output and lead to 200MW surges in a five-minute period the report said.” 
The article continued: “There were also questions about the impact of clustering windfarms in one area and whether spreading them more widely might ease pressure on the grid.” Research is being been undertaken by MetService and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. They “were being asked to analyse winds across the Tararuas to find out how similar conditions were at the two windfarms. The report said wind peaks at the same time would maximise generation output in a five-minute trading period and other windfarm developments were ‘likely [to] exacerbate operational and market impacts currently observed.’ ” 
The report continued: “ ‘We’re concerned that more windfarms could cause quality problems both in getting electricity to people and the quality they receive out of the wall’ …The report also said the accuracy of forecasting generation output from the Te Apiti and Tararua windfarms was poor.” That is what it said—that it was poor. The efficiency of wind farms is not as great as people expect. They are only 40 percent efficient and many turbines are needed in order to generate the megawatts required. In our area we have at Huntly Genesis Power’s 1000-megawatt power station but we would need many turbines to compensate for what we could get out of coal or thermal generation. 
So we say that although we support this legislation we certainly want to bring to the attention of those in the Wellington region that if the Wellington Regional Council moves into a commercial arena with wind generation or with any other energy generation—the bill actually says the council can look at renewable energy resources which mean solar wind hydro geothermal biomass tidal-wave and ocean-current sources—then there is a risk. National supports the bill but I draw to the public’s attention that there is a huge risk associated with that sort of commercial development by a territorial local authority.