Shaw James; Woods MeganHon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): Thank you Mr Speaker. I thank the Minister for her statement and I notice that the response from some members to my right is that what we need to do is to explore for more fossil fuels in response to the outage last night and the idea that future oil and gas—[Interruption]SPEAKER: Order!Hon JAMES SHAW: I know it's a little hard to hear me over the baying masses to the right but the irony that—or the kind of hole in the thinking that suggests that if there was exploration occurring now for fields that may or may not come on in the late 2020s or early 2030s that that would somehow have alleviated the situation last night. Particularly given that the head of the International Energy Agency themselves have said that actually we cannot bring any more fossil fuels online if we are to stop a climate catastrophe and in response to yesterday's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report the United Nations Secretary-General said that he thought that this should be the death knell for the fossil fuel industry.I did want to refer to something that the Minister had said about I guess the shame that actually this country hadn't invested in more renewables in a distributed grid much earlier and I wanted to ask the Minister about different forms of generation and distribution in the system. Given that there have been a number of reliability issues on the fossil fuels part of the system that the Huntly Rankine unit last night wasn't operating that the Pohokura gasfield outage caused a spike in demand late last year and of course there was the Auckland fuel pipeline rupture before that: what does that say about the reliability of fossil fuels? And what are her plans to increase distributed renewable energy generation and capacity such as rooftop solar and batteries to alleviate demand?Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): Mr Speaker I thank the member for that contribution. There's a number of questions in there; I'll start with the last on distributed energy and around what the plans are there. This certainly holds a very great potential for New Zealand—that the future of any energy system around the world is not only going to be decarbonised but it will also be distributed and it will be digitised as well. These are the things that we know about future energy systems. With that in mind this Government has to do at least two things to prepare itself for that. One that we know that distributed energy systems often rely on more intermittent forms of generation such as solar and wind and that we need a way to make sure that we are providing the security of supply into a system that does that. That is why the investment in pumped hydro is such an important part of planning an energy system for the future—we have to be planning for dry-year risk and we have to be doing that in a renewable way.In terms of how it is that we're gathering the data and understanding these distributed systems in a New Zealand context as the member knows in our COVID Budget we made an investment around a number of trials looking at a number of distributed systems largely on our public housing systems and in Māori housing. Some of these are array generation in terms of solar some of them are on roofs some of it's direct to hot water—we're seeing where we can get that co-benefit of savings for households as well as generation of electricity.