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.
56 Comments
Hmmmm , I like it ... " shovel ready " to the Gnats means getting on with projects immediately .... as opposed to under the current Hipkins government where it means the consultants are ready to shovel tens of $ millions of taxpayers money into their back pockets & clear off , without a single sod being turned ...
... sweet ... go the Gnats : more of this !
Yes. All very good. But there are other issues which could be looked at too. eg All power companies have a "portfolio" of power projects which could go ahead. And which are either being consented or have already been consented. Not all of these projects will go ahead. Because if say one party puts a big generator in an area which uses up all the transmission capacity, another party who has a potential generator in that area would have to meet the transmission upgrade requirements which can be cost prohibitive or dare I say it unpopular with the public. (Burning effergies of power co executives spring to mind).
Plus, once a big generator goes in, it depresses the power price in that area making further investment there not economical.
I think that some coordination is warranted. There is an awful lot of money being wasted on project investigations by power companies at the moment.
Investors spending hundreds of millions on power gen projects ought to do their due diligence. NZ also has a good network of solutions providers (dare I call them consultants in current times) in the energy space, those seeking assistance are almost spoilt for choice. That is if these resources haven't all been sucked into the scores of large renewable energy projects across the Tasman.
How's your EV car going Gummy? The Ute brigade must be coughing up fumes reading this announcement.
Dont go near an EV , those things are an environmental disaster ... stick to a nice clean green Toyota vitz ... 1275 cc of raw naked power ... vroooooom ....
Give you a race: Manual Suzuki Alto 1000cc of 3 cylinder thrum...
And if they want to build a windfarm next to your place???.no consent process so tough luck .
... doesn't bother me in the slightest ... it might brighten up the neighbourhood .... Nice !
There’s a few non-built northland bridges that would beg to differ…
What have bridges got to do with a policy to cut red tape? This is not an announcement to prioritise spending on power generation over roading
It’s a retort to Gummy’s assertion that the gnats get on with shovel ready projects.
Good to hear Nats want to step aside and let the private sector do its job. No one likes to spend millions on resource consent applications only to be shot down by bureaucracy or some fractional groups.
Something sensible from nats in a long while
Great stuff. Less talking, more action.
Nice to see National showing how much we've been slowed down by red tape.
Actually, we were hamstrung by the Bradford 'reforms'; the last gasp of a period of small-minded ideological nonsense. It was multi-Party nonsense; Moore never acknowledged why the Gatt initiative was inevitably doomed.
We've never recovered from that era - but what this tells us is that the conversation was leaving them all behind.
Yup. I was in government during that policy development/enactment - not directly involved in that policy area, but having lunch and coffees alongside those directly involved. Got the feeling even those at the top of that policy decision-making knew it was a 'last gasp' and indeed not one they really thought would achieve what they 'claimed' it would. So, why did they 'claim' what they did and push for it to happen? Too weak to admit their ideological crusade of the 'peak' of their civil service/management careers was always a crock and wreaked nothing but harm.
Yes. NZ INC would be far better off with a single zero profit SOE that system optimises the electricity system.
GDP is pretty much proportional to energy supply. We don’t need oligopoly providers milking excess profits out of the system at NZ Inc’s expense.
we are just lucky we didn’t go as far as the UK did.
Get that South Taranaki offshore wind farm in ASAP.
Good to see Luxon actually standing for something.
Totally agree..might see a Tesla in Taranaki one day?
Lithium ion isn't the answer.
Yep, who knows, perhaps, maybe, finally he is showing some get up and go, some well overdue substance. The electorate will respond to a cogent and well reasoned manifesto as it is the complete opposite, of the current lot in government.
The major generators have been sitting on a bunch of consented windfarms for decades. Consenting is not the bottleneck. It's simply not in their commercial interestes to increase supply.
Still perhaps making it easier could entice some smaller competitors, but if we want anything of scale, it's consented and waiting.
Don't spoil the soundbite.
> 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.
Um, what portion of that 40% is it viable to switch to electric? Sure poping down to my local shops i can easily do on an ebike, but industrial process heat? airfreight? Trucks? Interislander ferry?
No one even want to finish electrifying the north island main trunk line for rail freight, and the last national government was even going backwards, mothballing electrified rail and switch kiwirail from electric to diesel locomotives (reversed by Labour), but suddenly we can switch our entire transport and energy sector to elecriticy by 2050?
There needs to be a hard look at coastal sea freight. Cargo vessels can now work their holds in much the same manner as automated warehouses. That takes quite some pressure off port facilities. Ships on the ocean are obviously a lot less taxing on our environment than long haul trucking. Again take my hat off to Norman Kirk’s third Labour government who founded the Shipping Corporation of New Zealand in the 1970s, partly with this objective.
How are ships less taxing on the environment? Honest question, i have no clue on the relative merits outside of congestion and public safety on our roads. Would have though shipping was more taxing, boats having to constantly push all that water out of the way to move forward.
When considering the maximum number of containers that can be transported by each transport mode (ie 550 for coastal shipping, 40 for rail, and 1 for road), the maritime mode is shown to be slightly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions than the rail mode, and markedly better than the road mode. In fact, both maritime and rail modes are about twice as efficient as the road mode.
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/resources/research/reports/497/docs/497…
Genro vessels that carry fcls above deck with roro holds below provide both flexibility and efficiency. That ease of handling compensates quite a bit for longer transit times.
And don't pot hole our roads either
What’s the barrier to generating heat for industrial processes via electricity?
Cost per kwh,
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natural-resourc…
Some plants generate excess heat energy as a byproduct and generate their own electricity, such as fertilizer plants.
It would be nice to see plants that require heat energy input paired up with something like cool stores and recover the heat energy transferred to the atmosphere.
Sometimes you can use a liquid (glycol) to store and transfer heat energy. The problem is generally most companies who build these sorts of plants are always trying to build everything in a hurry and don't get the details correct and follow up on fine-tuning inefficiencies. Other barriers are reluctance to outlay more capital even when PBP is shortened and ROI increased. It falls by the wayside when the next project needs to be slapped together.
I'd imagine almost all green buildings don't live up to their specified performance for these reasons.
Sorry but isn't this the same mob who would cancel any further studies on the Lake Onslow scheme and who would immediately roll back the hugely successful clean car discount?
The same mob who instituted the dire part privatization of the electricity industry which has left the nation with the worst of both possible worlds in terms of future proofing one of our most strategically important industries?
Oh but they can blab a storm about 'cutting red tape' so that's OK then.........
... why not cut any further studies on it : the Lake Onslow scheme was a dog at $ 4 billion ... a whole litter of dogs at $ 16 billion ...
I wonder how many houses you could get rooftop solar installed on for that price?
Probably enough to completely unbalance the grid with intermittent supply, unless you build a sufficiently large battery to smooth it out. Perhaps something like Onslow? Dramatically cheaper than current battery technology (by several orders of magnitude) and with a much longer lifespan.
Depends on whether we need to balance the daily peaks and troughs or the seasonal ones. By the time Onslow is built, the big batteries sitting in everyone's driveways could be used to balance the daily peaks and troughs. As for seasonal, more non-hydro would help.
In a powering down world, don't bet on those batteries. Somewhere else this thread, I said 'ex import'. Remember that condition.
Then, water-at-height shows up for what it is; the most environmentally benign, do-able-anywhere, battery.
$ 16 billion buys a lot of solar / wind / geothermal ... all net electricity producers ...
... Onslow is a net electricity user ... it loses 20 % ... you put in 100 % , get back 80 % of that ...
That’s not the aim of the project though is it…
Correct : basically , Onslow is a $ 16 billion insurance policy ... it backdrops our energy supply if the hydro lakes run dry ...
... or ... spend that $ 16 billion on a range of initiatives which actually produce electricity ... solar / wind / geothermal / nat gas ...
It's a storage system. Store excess power, release when we are in deficit. Then we can build more solar (store power at midday, release in the evening) and wind (store power on windy days, release on calm days). Plus, it will replace the big pile of coal next to Huntly that currently sees us through dry years (store power in wet years, release in dry years).
Or alternatively, you can buy about two thirds of a bridge for the same price.
We can do that with the existing hydro lakes. They are more than adequate for daily or weekly time periods.
"it loses 20 %" - of unwanted power that normally loses 100%
There will be no 'unwanted' power if they move process heat to electric. We would have a major generation shortfall. So getting back 80% of nothing doesn't work.
Onslow needs suspended.
Smelter needs a definitive future.
Transmission line needs built to link manapouri to national grid.
Then, time to talk about build more green capacity.
If Onslow goes ahead, there will be both a need for more green generation and sufficient capacity buffering to allow much more intermittent generation than we can get away with now. They go hand-in-hand, not in competition.
Yes , Onslow is a frigging stupid idea .... waste of $ 16 billion .... build 20 more geothermal power plants with that , instead ...
$16 billion is bollocks, there must be a lot of fat in there. Someone needs to challenge the costing. It is a bad idea because of the price that labour oversaw
... it's a bad idea because the man said $ 16 billion was enough to construct 20 new geothermal plants very close to where the electricity is to be used : Auckland ...
And , it's a bad idea because it loses 20 % more power than it produces ... it creates a net loss of power to the grid ... who'd spend $ 16 billion , to lose 20 % annually ... only Labour ...
Pure conjecture. Implicit in your statement is that 16 billion is a correct price and there are 20 sites readily available where geothermal could be economically developed, connected to grid etc. Both are wrong assumptions.
He's pretty good at those - reminds me of 'clean coal' Brownlee; dinosaur territory.
But he's not the only one - the problem isn't just energy, or just clean energy, it is the whole human enterprise, which is severely overshot of what the planet can sustain. Back that up, and your 'private enterprise' is moot, because it requires profit, which demands growth in resource draw-down (profit is an expectation to buy 'more'). That rules out economic growth, indeed it requires an orders-of-magnitude degrowth. Nature is starting to do it to us anyway, but better if we go voluntarily.
So we require something different; a resilient, maintainable, hand-on-able system, ex profit.
On that backdrop, paint your societal picture. I suggest it's local generation, resilience, capability to go alone, capability to fix ex imports.
Onslow made perfect sense, and Bardsley is no fool - but whether we have the build-time left, and whether the transmission grid is maintainable in present form, are the prior questions. Asking Simon Upton to do an overview, would be better than these calculated-to-get-votes sound-bytes.
Its nice to actually see a policy from the Nats and its an OK one.
But it seems like more of the usual climate politics: we can build our way out of climate change, no one needs to make any sacrifices, we just need to cut some red tape and build more power plants. Labour are no better, they determined that we need to drive less to meet our climate targets but then decided to build more road lanes over the harbour.
Luxon identifies some good points but I find it funny heis emphasising consents when companies like genesis are camping on consents for major wind projects.
The barrier we have to building generation is the market structure put in place by max Bradford that punishes commercial users and disincentivises building new generation.
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/03/25/eminent-oxford-scientist-says-wind-…
Says it all really
I believe in "Electrify Everything" so congratulations Mr Luxon and the Nats.
I joined with Octopus eight months ago and since they have owed me $80.00 a month on the power bill because of my solar. So just today I joined my other residence onto the same scheme. I think it will work out about zero.
I change cars rarely but the next one will be electric. Then it might be time to slap up another twenty panels or so.
If those go to the other house, and the intelligent car allows drawdown, then I would rarely draw down any power at all, and continue to send a lot out the gate. If this was done on national basis there is no need to blow $16Bil on Onslow.
Given that I have little drawdown from the grid and I add a lot of power to the system (for an individual) it would satisfy I think mfd's objections to Onslow alternatives. (mfd won't agree)
Then if smart IT sharing is implemented in our local community then we could really smooth the demands, spare the grid, and also provide a lot of power for net users elsewhere. Wonderbar.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thepanel/audio/2018884165/the…,
Ralph Sims on the plan
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