I somehow had no idea that was what they were doing there. Interesting! Climate change plus neglected infrastructure is going to = more power outages for sure.
Batteries will be a great way to cover peak shortfalls.
Pumped hydro might have been a better way, rather than all that battery manufacturing, but I haven't given up hope on the pumped hydro yet.
@Dave @liv Its horses for courses. Pumped hydro is great in areas with suitable terrain and for longer term storage. In other areas / applications batteries make sense. NZ is of course capital constrained. It would be great to do everything altogether all at once but its a journey right and you have to bring people along with you.
There is also a weird effect with new tech where delaying actually makes economic sense if costs are going down so you get the most bang for your buck by holding off for a bit.
I don't know much about pumped hydro but it sounds good!
This is really dumb of me but I just realized someone tried to describe this battery facility to me and I somehow thought they were talking about this fish farm.
Pumped hydro is basically pumping the water from a hydro dam back to the top of the dam to be used again. It's basically a form of battery, use energy on days when you have too much so that you have water in your hydro lakes for days when you don't have enough power.
The incoming government cancelled it pretty early on, I think this long term thinking was getting in the way of tax cuts.
This is really dumb of me but I just realized someone tried to describe this battery facility to me and I somehow thought they were talking about this fish farm.
Ah interesting!
Pumped hydro sounds super useful! There's no hydro in Northland but if it had a better infrastructure there is room for geothermal and solar.
Is there an active geothermal area in Northland? I once saw a proposal to use forestry slash in combination with geothermal. Use the slash as fuel to get the geothermal heated water up to the next level for better power generation, then capture the CO2 and pump it underground. I think this is the article I read.
I think Northland has a lot of forestry, so if you have geothermal you could do this idea!
Fascinating out of the box idea. It does have geothermal at Ngawha which is relatively near a forestry and could be expanded significantly.
While looking for that website I just stumbled on a tiny, rickety old hydro station so turns out I was wrong about that!
It does have geothermal at Ngawha which is relatively near a forestry and could be expanded significantly.
Opened in 2020! Your link also says "The Ngāwhā geothermal field is the only high temperature geothermal resource in New Zealand, outside the Taupo Volcanic Zone." so I think I'm allowed to be surprised 😅
While looking for that website I just stumbled on a tiny, rickety old hydro station so turns out I was wrong about that!
It can be fascinating reading the list of power stations in NZ.
I noticed one that's believed to be one of the oldest continually operating hydroelectric plants in the world. Mokopeka, since 1891. Some photos here.
That's so cool! I love old "modern" tech like old subways etc.
That list really is fascinating. Thank you Dave you always give me something to dive into! I get the sense that we are way under-utilizing solar.
Solar has got a lot cheaper recently, and big projects take time. But they are happening now!
That list of power stations has 8 operational solar fars and another 18 proposed/in development!
That's awesome!
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