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Thread ID: 130846	2013-04-18 11:54:00	Cheaper power?? Yeah, right!	johcar (6283)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
1337435	2013-04-20 05:03:00	For God's sake, this forum sucks!!! Since when were d u n g and s h i t objectionable words? Maybe we should emulate the medical profession and say feces? I note that crap is alright, strange moderators out there! Nothing to do with the moderators. Automatic settings in the admin module of the forum change objectionable words to asterisks - that's Fairfax's right to set those standards...	johcar (6283)
1337436	2013-04-20 05:05:00	First of all, have you ever known a Government run enterprise to be efficient? The price of power in NZ is not high compared to other countries. Its the low purchasing power of the people that is the problem. If there was less waste the situation would be better. Dairy farmers should generate their own power, and even feed into the National Grid. They have a problem with tons of cow dung, polluting the land and water ways. If they turned the cow **** into gas they would have more than enough power, and the waste from the gas generator would be perfect fertilizer. Same goes for all the food scraps and **** from the Cities. In Tanzania I visited a large pig farm. All the power was provided by the pigs using a digester, very cheap and simple to make, and a Lister power plant. The Government should make NZ **** free, and use fewer resources! In rural North China the crap from the toilets is processed for gas and fertilizer. Spot on! Especially the first sentence!	johcar (6283)
1337437	2013-04-20 08:27:00	For God's sake, this forum sucks!!! Since when were d u n g and s h i t objectionable words? Maybe we should emulate the medical profession and say feces? I note that crap is alright, strange moderators out there! vBulletin defaults?	Chilling_Silence (9)
1337438	2013-04-20 20:56:00	I think its just a Green Party attempt to derail the power generator sell off program. I heard David Shearer on the radio the other and he could not even articulate how it will work. All he kept saying is that power is too dear. That said I do wish the power generators would start to lower the rate of their increases. There is very little inflation in other sectors	Digby (677)
1337439	2013-04-20 21:15:00	For years we were told that we need to build new generation capacity, and prices had to go up to pay for it. All of a sudden we have too much capacity. What did they do with all the money they stole from us for this "needed" capacity increase, and why are prices now not coming down to take this charge off?	wotz (335)
1337440	2013-04-20 21:46:00	For years we were told that we need to build new generation capacity, and prices had to go up to pay for it. All of a sudden we have too much capacity. What did they do with all the money they stole from us for this "needed" capacity increase, and why are prices now not coming down to take this charge off? What?? Since when do we have "too much capacity"?? Hydro power is pretty much like a hose that you can't turn off/up/down (without incurring very large costs). The problem with electricity supply and demand, and our reliance on hydro-generated power is that it's VERY difficult to add more supply into the grid if there is a sudden peak in demand. And there is nowhere to store excess generated power if demand is low (which is why there is a spot market for power - sell it off cheap when demand is low and get it used). (With nuclear power (I know, dirty words in NZ) this problem goes away to a large extent - when demand is up, they pull the damping rods up out of the pile and more energy is produced. When demand is low, the damping rods are lowered.) Since I think everyone would hope/anticipate that New Zealand is growing economically, we should also recognise that our power needs as a country should also be growing (how else will you charge up your iPad?), therefore we will always need "more capacity". And since prices of everything tend to trend in an upwards direction, we should also expect this of electricity. How else is the maintenance of current infrastructure and the extra capacity going to be paid for? Which brings me back to my earlier comment (#15) about fixing the big things and stop trying to fiddle with things that would take care of themselves if everyone was gainfully employed (I know - another argument there around employability!) and earning a fair income.	johcar (6283)
1337441	2013-04-20 21:53:00	For years we were told that we need to build new generation capacity, and prices had to go up to pay for it. All of a sudden we have too much capacity. What did they do with all the money they stole from us for this "needed" capacity increase, and why are prices now not coming down to take this charge off? And we were also told: "Energy Minister Max Bradford claimed that promoting competition in the electricity sector would bring price reductions, with gains flowing through to household and small business consumers. He identified long-term efficiency gains as the objective of the reforms (Bradford, 1998)". (place Tui Add here)	B.M. (505)
1337442	2013-04-20 22:09:00	Problem is our country isn't big enough for too much competition, the diversity spreads the customer base too thin making return on investments impossible and future growth and development uneconomical. Just look at the broadband sector, it's been relatively slow all things considered for the last 12-13 years since it first went in. Granted we were at the forefront of technology back in the day when we first got "Jetstream", but too much competition in the market and our limited target audience means it's simply not viable. That Local-loop unbundling, remind me again how well that went? The 3,600 cabinets that we now have spread across the country, remind me why there is *just* Chorus kit in it? Same for power in this country, we're not large enough to warrant a significant number of suppliers.	Chilling_Silence (9)
1337443	2013-04-20 22:26:00	And we were also told: "Energy Minister Max Bradford claimed that promoting competition in the electricity sector would bring price reductions, with gains flowing through to household and small business consumers. He identified long-term efficiency gains as the objective of the reforms (Bradford, 1998)". (place Tui Add here) Agreed (and see Chill's post above) The thing that was naively unforeseen (at least by us punters) was that the cheaper power prices applied to the big users: industry, rather than households.	johcar (6283)
1337444	2013-04-20 23:07:00	I do think that the high price rises have tended to slow down. Why has no media ever interviewed Max Bradford and pinned him down on his reforms. He promised lower prices - we got higher prices. Of course some of the higher prices were to pay for the transmission upgrades which of course were needed.	Digby (677)
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