Media statement
For immediate release
13 August 2009

Electricity market review misses economic and environmental growth opportunities

The Ministerial Electricity Market Review document released yesterday misses important opportunities to increase market competition and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to electricity consumer group REFIT-NZ.

“Consumers can no longer be seen as passive players limited to energy efficiency measures only.

The Government should be investing in our environmental economical future where consumers play a key role” said REFIT-NZ Chairperson, Charmaine Watts.

“The energy industry accounts for 28% of New Zealand’s greenhouse gasses. On the one hand, Minister for the Environment Nick Smith says it’s a challenge to reduce overall emissions by 10 to 20 per cent. On the other, the Government is showing a real lack of innovative thinking toward raising the contribution of renewables within our electricity sector”, stated Ms Watts.

Electricity generated from renewable resources in New Zealand has fallen from over 80% in 1987 to around 68% today. The majority of this comes from large scale plants and needs to be cabled from one end of the country to another.

“With the current reliance on our under invested electricity grid and increasing consumer resistance to large scale wind farms and hydro dams, growth of distributed generation through small scale renewables must be seriously considered”, said Ms Watts.

”Governments throughout the developed world are legislating policies called Feed-in Tariffs. This is a mechanism proven to successfully increase the uptake of renewable energy, create significant numbers of jobs and grow economies”.

“The Ministry of Economic Development is aware of how successful these initiatives have been elsewhere, but are yet to carry out research to see how such a strategy would impact New Zealand. This is surprising given the aggressive goals of their Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy” concluded Ms Watts.

REFIT-NZ is currently consulting with Kema, a globally acknowledged authority on strategic and technical energy solutions, to undertake a publically funded New Zealand specific feasibility study looking at renewable distributed generation.

ENDS

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