Fitzsimons Jeanette: Electricity (Continuance of Supply) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Electricity (Continuance of Supply) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 23 September 2008. Volume:650;Page:19080. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Electricity Act 1992 was passed when the doctrine of user-pays was at its height. Even if those people were in remote areas producing high-quality farming products for New Zealand’s exports they were expected to pay whatever it took to take electricity to them regardless of the usefulness of the economic work they were providing for the rest of the country. That was the way the National Government worked at that time. It was right into user-pays. And the threat that the power supply of rural communities might be withdrawn in 2013 has been hanging over them ever since particularly in areas with high wind speeds where weather conditions often crash the lines and where the maintenance costs are therefore very high. So we welcome the fact that security is being restored to people who live in those remote locations often performing very useful work for the economy as a whole.  
That year 1992 was also an era of rapidly advancing technology when distributed generation showed promise for being able to relieve the grid in many cases of the burden of having to service very far-flung areas. So even at the time this legislation was passed there was a thought I think that by 2013 the distributed renewables would be in a position in many communities to take over. They are still priced a bit on the high side but there will be some areas where that is true. It means that for the first time people will start to think in terms of energy services rather than just wires and kilowatt hours. They will think about the end use of energy that they actually want to achieve and what is the best way to get there. It may not simply be more kilowatt hours it may be greater use of firewood it may be greater use of solar or wind it may be small-scale hot spot geothermal—a range of renewables that back each other up. It is much easier to do it at community level than it is at single house level. The technologies of wave and tidal generation are advancing. We have some equipment now being tested in the water and the best places for that tend to occur in quite remote locations dotted around the periphery of New Zealand.  
We may well find that there are areas where a mix of these distributed renewables will make it possible to let the line go down altogether. And we will find in those communities that it is often much cheaper to manage demand down than it is to build supply up—that more efficient equipment is usually a much cheaper way of reducing electricity consumption than simply building more supply or putting in more solar panels. I have a little experience in this having lived off-grid for 13 years. I know that batteries are the weak link in the system and therefore a larger community of people and a range of sources of generation that needs less storage is a good thing to aim for. This may in fact turn out to be the jumping-off point for distributed renewables around New Zealand to give us the experience of development so that they then move more into the mainstream.  
I also want to say a few words about solar water heating. I could only laugh when Nick Smith talked about the need to include hot water heat-pumps in the solar scheme and said that that was National’s policy. When the solar scheme was first announced a couple of years ago we made it very clear that there was work under way to look at including hot water heat-pumps in the scheme. It was not possible at that stage because we had no equivalent way of measuring the energy performance to compare them with solar. That work has been done and yesterday’s announcement signalled the fact that we now can measure the energy performance of hot water heat-pumps and we therefore are in a position to give them a grant in the same way that we give solar. This is hardly adopting National’s policy. This is carrying out precisely what we said we were going to do 2½ years ago and the work plan to do that has now been completed.  
I was also very interested when Dr Smith announced a policy of doubling the grant to $1000 some months back—early this year—because it happened the week after we had made that decision with officials and it was not yet public. I did wonder how he got had hold of that information but that work was— 
Peter Brown 
: I didn’t say that. 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS 
: Well if the member is telling me that I lied to the House I take objection to that. 
Peter Brown 
: I’m not telling you that you lied to the House. 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS 
: Well it is one thing or the other. It is either true or it is not and it is actually true. That has been the position for some time; it was announced many months ago that the grant had been increased.  
In terms of the financial assistance I want to mention Dr Smith’s position on solar water heating. [ 
Interruption 
] Madam Assistant Speaker I think I spent quite a lot of time speaking in detail about the bill. I am now talking about one technology that has the ability to significantly reduce energy demand at the ends of lines so that alternatives can be developed and answering some matters that have been raised in the House that were simply untrue. Dr Smith’s policy was simply to throw money at any solar water heater that wanted it never mind how much energy it would save never mind the quality standards never mind the training programmes for the installers—just throw money at mates in the solar water heating industry.  
The Greens did not do that. We set up training schemes because we found that a lot of solar water heaters in the past had been put in very badly and we now have quality standards for installation. We have quality standards for the hardware because some of that did not measure up. We have performance modelling for the systems so we know how much energy the solar water heaters will save. The National Party’s policy is to just throw money at it regardless of what it does—to not require it to be cost-effective for the consumer and to not require it to save energy. I guess that is why National has to borrow so much for its policy—in order to pay for this kind of largesse.