National party leader Christopher Luxon says his government would make it easier to get resource consent for renewable energy projects, if elected in October.
The opposition party today announced the first part of its ‘Electrify NZ’ plan which aims to double the supply of clean energy and help the NZ economy shift away from fossil fuels.
“To deliver on New Zealand’s climate goals, we need whole sectors of the New Zealand economy to switch to clean electricity,” Luxon said in a statement.
“It makes no sense to encourage the shift to electric vehicles if the power comes from burning coal. New Zealand must have enough renewable electricity to meet the rising demand.”
More than 40% of NZ’s carbon emissions come from transport and energy, so switching those two sectors to renewable sources could get the country a third of the way to net zero by 2050.
National wants transportation and industrial processing plants to be powered by clean electricity, rather than coal and oil, but sees the Resource Management Act as being a barrier to achieving that goal.
Luxon said a new wind farm can take ten years to complete: “eight years to obtain resource consent, and two years to build”.
The Electrify NZ plan would require decisions to be made on resource consents relating to renewable energy within 12-months and for those consents to last 35 years.
It would also scrap consenting requirements for upgrades to existing assets and introducing new pricing rules that could incentivise new infrastructure.
Fast track for wind and solar
To hasten the consenting process, the party would issue a National Policy Statement for Renewable Electricity Generation and introduce environmental standards that defined which projects would be approved.
“As long as an application complies with the strict standards, including restrictions on where a solar or wind farm can be built, councils can set conditions but, in most cases, will not be able to decline it,” Luxon said.
There will also be regulation relief for electricity lines companies, which will no longer need consents for upgrades.
New Zealand needs more than $40 billion of investment in transmission and local lines this decade, according to a recent estimate by Boston Consulting Group.
Luxon said new pricing rules will be required to drive investment in electricity transmission and distribution.
Electricity lines companies are monopolies, so their investments, pricing and returns are regulated by the Commerce Act — which National intends to update.
Some of the proposed changes include allowing new connections to local lines, such as EV charging stations, to recover some of the upfront costs from future connections, and introducing an information disclosure regime to monitor connection costs to make sure they are reasonable.
The goal is to provide greater certainty around cost recovery for regulated infrastructure and avoid excessive costs.
Luxon said this was not the only part of the Electrify NZ plan, nor the only part of the party’s climate policy — for example, he promised to address agricultural emission soon.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that renewables are the new oil. A country would once have been considered fortunate to have oil reserves, but now it’s lucky to have renewables. In that respect, New Zealand truly is the lucky country.”
He said Labour’s line about getting to “100% renewable” was the wrong target and not ambitious enough. The goal should be to double our renewable energy production, which would be more like 200% renewable.
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