Category: Featured

Power Crisis Over? Teeth Gnashing Begins

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However, will the result  be the same as 1998?

 

And so the Isthmus is no longer powerless with power restored to all but a few hundred homes as of this morning.

For full details (and saving me repeating a lot of it) you can read the Herald article here (as well as see the damage): http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11338075

 

And so with the Crisis over and the response teams doing a very fine job (and so I send thanks), the job of teeth gnashing (the inquiry) will begin.

However, I do wonder if the inquiry will be somewhat pointless as unless it was truly an Act of God that set the cables alight we I am suspicious again of: Failure in planning, governance and investment.

From what I can see from the Herald this morning in the above linked article it seems already it might be just that.

 

Let me put it this way. Go watch the second Matrix Movie where they attempt to enter the building where Neo will find the Architect. They need to shut the power down to the building or the self destruct triggers. So they blow up a power station which initially causes the black out until the smart grid reroutes power very quickly. The back up was shut down manually after that but that was caused by man-made (well Niobe) interference.

Point?

Large advanced cities have smart grids that reroute power in the event such as what Auckland just went through. Granted that Otahuhu Power Station and substation got reinforced and that the new cabling rerouted power back to the City Centre however, Penrose is still a choke point and it again (last was 2012) blacked out a large portion of the Isthmus. After the 1998 and especially after 2006 sagas this should not happen of we truly invested in a true smart grid system. AND we should not be paying a cent more on our power bills to get such a system. No Prime Minister, your advice should have been to tell the AECT (read the Herald article on who they are) to forego the $300m dividend paid out to consumers for five years and have that dividend money invested back into the grid until we have a true smart grid.

 

However, knowing New Zealand we will do the teeth gnashing and within three years maybe another blackout on the Isthmus…

Consider ourselves lucky we don’t operation commercial nuclear power stations…..