Fitzsimons Jeanette: Urgent Debates — Energy—Project Aqua Cancellation 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Urgent Debates — Energy—Project Aqua Cancellation 
[Volume:616;Page:12064] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 New Zealand’s largest braided river has had a reprieve and so have the people of the Waitaki valley. The Waitaki is one of our grand rivers. When one goes down it in a boat one senses its awesome power. It is home to a number of species of endangered wildlife. It has considerable wetlands of ecological value along its margins. It is an international fishery virtually the only one in New Zealand that has all species of trout and salmon in the same river and tourists come from the other side of the world to fish it. 
But there are some whose whole mission in life is taming nature. It is time we accepted that whenever we want more we cannot just carve another slice off the finite environment. Project Aqua would have taken 73 percent of the water in that river completely out of the river channel into a canal. It would have reduced it to a shingle bed with a trickle. The same runoff going into the river diluted with 73 percent less water would have seriously deteriorated water quality until it was unfit for human contact. Worst of all Aqua would have produced nothing in a very dry winter because there would have been nothing left to go into the canal leaving us even more exposed on security of supply. We cannot continue to put all our eggs in the same basket of hydro from the same catchments. Aqua would have encouraged the building of back-up coal-fired power stations for winter at considerably increased cost and discouraged the building of wind generation which needs to be able to sell its product year round. Aqua would have produced nothing at all not a single unit before 2009 and possibly much later. 
Renewable energy is getting a better press these days than it used to and that is good. However the next step is to understand that although water that falls from the sky is renewable braided rivers are not. The Green Party has been publicising this latest assault on a spectacular river and later today I will seek to table 111 copies of our leaflet on Project Aqua and the Waitaki River so that other members in the House may understand why it was important to stop this project and the raft of other opportunities we have instead. So we celebrate its withdrawal. We congratulate Meridian which has always prided itself on being a renewable generator on its determination to seek other sustainable options that will come onstream much faster than Aqua could have. 
 It is said that Aqua fell over because of the Resource Management Act but the Act had been in place for years before Aqua was ever planned. It is quite clear that Meridian Energy thought it could get Aqua though the Resource Management Act and that is partly because of a loophole. There was no water plan and therefore there was no minimum flow set for the river. It is clear that the Waitaki bill as amended by the Local Government and Environment Committee with a high level independent authority setting an environmental base flow to protect the river ecology and the values of the community would never have allocated 73 percent to Aqua—nor should it. 
I pay tribute to the local community which generated more than 6000 submissions on the applications of Meridian Energy to take water. I think that response may also have warned Meridian that this was a project that just did not have community support. Fortunately Meridian has reacted quickly and it has happened in time for New Zealand to make other plans. We are facing serious issues of balancing electricity supply and demand and I put it that way very deliberately. For 25 years we have relied to meet all possible shortfalls on very cheap energy from the Maui gasfield. Because it was cheap it was squandered on wasteful inefficient uses in just 30 years when actually it was large enough to have lasted us for 100. We also face the prospect of reduced rainfall in the current hydro catchments. 
This decision has of course been welcomed by the coal industry and by its cheerleaders—United National and ACT—as a green light for coal. It is not. The world has got enough accessible coal to raise the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere tenfold. Scientists tell us that if the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere even doubles we are in for serious climate change. We have to get to grips with the idea that just because the coal is there does not mean it is safe to burn it. New Zealand has got enough coal deposits to generate power for generations—if we turn a blind eye to the huge environmental damage it causes. We should not. Clean coal is a myth. Sure one can reduce the sulphur and reduce the particulates and that has been true for some time but one cannot reduce the carbon dioxide; one cannot reduce the climate-change effects of coal. Just replacing Maui gas with coal without any growth or increase would double the greenhouse emissions from electricity. Meeting our current electricity growth with coal makes our Kyoto Protocol commitment unachievable it holds back new technology for decades and it positions us in the 19th century instead of the 21st. But it is not just the emissions; it is the mining damage the acid mine drainage the land subsidence and all the other environmental effects that go with coal mining. 
The Green Party will continue to challenge the “Black parties” on coal. We will challenge the “Big Coal parties” of United ACT and National. We will challenge the “Little Coal Party” of Labour and the Green Party will be the “No-new-coal Party”. New Zealand can meet its needs without either coal or Aqua. 
I want to refer back to what I said about challenging the balance between electricity supply and demand. We know that for 30 years there has been the science of “gap-ology”—the gap that is always supposed to be opening up between demand and supply because demand keeps on growing. We have to address both sides of the equation. Remember it was only back in the 1970s we were told that if we did not have a nuclear power-station built by the late 1980s we would be freezing in the dark in the 1990s. Well it did not happen. One needs only live where one is responsible for generating power to realise fast that investment in efficient lights fridges and computers is far far cheaper than investment in more supply. That is also true for the country. 
New Zealand is rich with opportunities to invest in energy efficiency. Many assessments show that 20 percent of our total electricity can be saved—cost-effectively. When I put that question to the Minister at question time he interpreted that as a 20 percent improvement in the uptake of energy efficiency. That is the National Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy target—but I have never supported it—that gives us only 2 percent a year. Instead we should aim at a 20 percent reduction in the energy per unit of gross domestic product. 
The opportunities in commercial lighting and air conditioning are huge. Energy audits of businesses like sawmills regularly find that 30 percent savings are possible. How many motorways out in the country miles from anywhere—no houses no pedestrians no cyclists—have full-scale lighting down both sides of the motorway for miles and miles? Yet motorcars have lights. Some end uses of electricity are simply not worth the environmental cost they cause. Then there are all the supply options when we have dealt with demand—for example direct solar use of heat in new buildings direct use of solar heat for water heating. The Minister said that wind generation could provide another 4000 megawatts. That is a huge proportion—about 50 percent of our current electricity. It is much faster than Aqua and it is cost-effective. The “wall of wood” coming towards us from the maturing pine forests contains within it enough waste not usable by the forestry industry which contains energy equivalent to half a Maui gasfield—80 petajoules a year. That is useful in industry for co-generation of heat and electricity. 
The options are there. Cheap energy is a myth. Cheap energy is like a flat earth. Cheap energy we have had for decades and because of cheap energy we have wasted it and we have built up a culture of energy inefficiency. It is not actually cheap at all. We have paid for it in sickness. We have paid for it in loss of our environment. We have paid for it in climate change. It is time we changed our pricing structures. It is time we changed our balance of supply and demand. It is time we went for a sustainable energy future and although I do not agree with the current Minister on everything I congratulate him on being the first one New Zealand has ever had to try to tackle that challenge.