Drastic Change Needed to Achieve Climate Goals

Cutting CO2 emissions will be difficult without a complete national commitment, the extent of which should not be underestimated says Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand (IPENZ) Chief Executive Dr Andrew Cleland.

Dr Cleland’s comments came in the release of the Summary of Policy Makers of Working Group III of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Economic development tends to increase energy use per capita – so dramatic steps on energy efficiency are necessary to keep energy use per person constant, let alone reduce it. IPENZ has advocated for tough minimum efficiency standards based on minimum life cycle costs in areas of high energy usage such as transport, heating, and electricity”, Dr Cleland says.

“This approach is best practice both environmentally and economically sensible – the best of both worlds. It is intolerable to import vehicles or appliances with low efficiency. Growing evidence shows that accepting only efficient technology does not lead to increased purchase costs. For example, picking up clean diesel technology, which would happen with minimum vehicle standards, will do more than requiring some biofuel use.”

“Even best practice on the demand side will lead to increasing demands for electricity in particular as inefficient fossil fuel use is replaced by more efficient electricity-using technologies. Meeting that demand renewably is an enormous challenge – so how will we meet that demand? Geothermal has more potential, and the industry is moving to take that up, but without freeing up availability of rivers the hydro potential is very limited.”

“Unpredictable supplies such as wind, wave and tidal can only make a small contribution to peak demands, and will require thermal back-up for many years until power from these sources can be collected off-peak and delivered at peak times. If New Zealanders really want to avoid more thermal plants, even if they do everything reasonably possible on efficiency they may still need to debate the merits or otherwise of nuclear generated power.”

 “Downtime on nuclear plants would not cause any more difficulty that closing a 250MW unit at Huntly does right now – the industry is used to dealing with such issues. Whilst building a nuclear infrastructure would be difficult, its inclusion in the mix of New Zealand’s energy supply is feasible. The question New Zealanders need to ask is: to avoid nuclear, what else they will accept instead, and the cupboard of choices is remarkably bare.”

IPENZ has been advocating the implementation of minimum standards and other measures since mid-2006 when it published Engineering a National Energy Strategy (available at http://www.ipenz.org.nz/IPENZ/Media_Comm/Additional_publications.cfm).

ENDS

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