Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): I will address some of the questions that have been asked. There were questions around our coal usage this year—what's driving increased demand and to put that into context. The member asked for the proportion: I don't have that proportion on me in terms of the electricity sector but I'm happy to get that to the member at a later time. What we do know is that the provisional data for coal use and electricity generation for the second quarter of 2021 is estimated at 585000 tonnes for a total of over 1 million tonnes in the first half of 2021. This suggests that New Zealand is on track to use similar amounts of coal for electricity generation as the dry period 2005-08.So I think that we can see that when we have low levels in the hydro system and we don't have gas contributing to that this is the way the system is set up to provide energy in New Zealand. As I've outlined this is not something that we as a Government are content to see continue—that we simply must find ways in which we can store energy for a dry year in a renewable form which leads me on to some of the questions that have just been asked by the member that's just taken his seat Simon Court. He's been asking why it is that there's been continued investment in generation when the Government is looking at providing a storage dam. There is a bit of conflation in the contribution that the member just made around generation and storage. Of course the pumped hydro that we're looking at is not a hydro dam in terms of it being a generator; it is a place in which we will store energy to use in a dry year. So it's not in a similar vein to a Manapōuri or a Clyde dam; it is quite different.I don't accept the assertion in the member's question that we're not seeing investment in new renewable generation. In fact we're seeing quite an uptick of investment in new renewable generation. We've seen a billion dollars invested by private generators this year alone. They can see that there is a huge growing demand for electricity. As we move away from fossil fuels we decarbonise our economy and there is that growth pathway for electricity. I think over $1 billion of investment puts pay to that assertion.What we also know is that—and moving on to another question that was asked around solar—it's actually dry-year storage that will unlock the real potential of some of our more intermittent renewable sources such as wind and solar in New Zealand. The fact that we can have that ability to release from a pumped hydro system will mean that we can see more of an uptake in wind and solar. Wind is a very proven technology in New Zealand. I don't think we have enough data on solar and the potential in a number of permutations and that is exactly why we have invested the $28 million into getting data through trials on our Māori housing and our public housing stock. Some of it will be stored in batteries some of it will go direct to hot water some of it will be a solar array that generates for a community rather than individual houses but I do note that we're still learning a lot about different capacities for solar at different latitudes in New Zealand.So for example I opened the Halfmoon Bay School solar array recently and that's performing at 20 percent ahead of the projections for the solar activity you'd get at those latitudes. So we've got more data that we need to learn and that we do need to make sure that we're understanding the full potential because intermittent renewable sources will definitely be a large part of our decarbonised pathway. But we need to make sure that we have good renewable storage solutions set up there as well.