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There has long been a rumor going around and like all great rumors this one is totally un-substantiated. That there is a large bay in Japan that has had a sea wall built and the land behind it reclaimed from the sea. The reason for this reclamation is to provide hundreds of acres of flat land for a growing local port. Smart move, but there is nothing unusual about that. What makes this rumor worthy of repeating is what this reclaimed piece of land is backfilled with.
Cheap New Zealand coal and millions of tonnes of it.
Simple strategies really, use the coal as backfill and when the price of coal goes out through the roof, they dig it back up again.
Long term plan, but money in the bank, or in this case money in the ground.
What’s the number one import that comes across this wharf, cheap New Zealand coal.
What do they use all this coal for? You guessed it, electricity. They have built a high tech, state of the art, coal fired power station close to the port, which will supply all of the power needs for the modern city that has sprung up around this modern man made port.
What’s the guarantee on the billions of dollars invested in this project?
Yeap, right again, the capital gain on the cheap New Zealand coal under the land reclamation.
Why I brought this rumor of sound, logical, common sense leadership by the Japanese Government to your attention, is to draw a comparison with our own future thinking on the subject of the upcoming electricity needs of our country.
So what’s our plan for the future?
Totally destroy one of only three braided rivers in the world by digging a canal along side it and funneling this already precious resource through six small dams that will have no great long term effect on our energy needs. Brilliant.
Now that the insanity of the giant Project Aqua has disappeared into the recesses of our collective memory, the question of how to solve New Zealand’s future energy sources needs addressing. I don’t have the answers, I wish I did.
What I do know, is that the worlds resources are finite and that some of them are running out faster than we ever imagined possible.
Good government, like good business, requires leaders who put sound forward thinking strategies in place.
Sixty percent of New Zealand’s cheapest electricity needs come from a hydro source, yet only Manapouri is located on the West Coast with New Zealand’s highest rain fall. Most are situated on the usually dry East Coast and this situation will only worsen as global warming bites deeper.
While East Coast farmers celebrate a 20 millimeter rain fall, West Coasters drearily don their wet weather gear, under 14 feet of rain per annum.
Surely the number one requirement of a hydro scheme must be water, put the dams where it rains. Does it seem like I’m stating the obvious?
What the West Coast also has in abundance is cheap coal; start investing now in how to turn this resource into electricity without further destroying the planet through global warming.
As we are an extremely inventive race of people, we just may end up with another product we can export.
The biggest inefficiency of our national grid, I am told, is the transmission loss.
Why is this?
The powers in the Deep South and the people live in the North. The power lines that connect them are old and need replacing due to a total lack of forward thinking in the past, now it’s going to cost $1.5 Billion dollars to fix the problem. Wouldn’t it be smarter to move the punters closer to the power?
I am sure that with decent tax incentives as a bonus, most companies would like to move out of our gridlocked premier city (John Banks is going to kill me for suggesting this) and thus bring their employees and consumers with them.
If a minor traffic accident on the Harbour Bridge is estimated to cost the National economy $2 million dollars and Auckland’s regular gridlock many billions more, then the
insanity of encouraging one third of our population to live on an isthmus twenty three kilometers wide will be seen for what it is, pure folly.
If the country’s population was balanced, surely this would take the pressure off the Nation’s previously poorly funded transport system and our inadequate power infrastructure. As I’ve said I don’t have all the answers, but what we really need right now, is good sound leadership based on plain common sense.
But then, that’s “Just an old trucker’s point of view”
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