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Eli Campbell-Stokes's avatar

Great article. Of particular interest is the rate of dividend payouts to investment in new generation which has seen capacity rise 6% since 2004, despite population increasing 30%. The New Zealand Official Yearbook for 2004 (available on stats NZ) has this scarcely believable paragraph (hindsight is everything of course):

"Projections suggest that New Zealand will have much slower population growth in the future. The population is currently projected to peak at 4.81 million in 2046.

"Assuming fertility levels remain below replacement level, New Zealand would need a sustained net migration gain of nearly 10,000 a year to reach 5 million. Although annual net migration has exceeded 40,000 in recent years, the external migration balance has also fluctuated widely, with several periods of net migration loss."

This was only 20 years ago, but energy companies (and the government before it sold half of them) needed to recognise it could not rest on its laurels of old plants and had an obligation to invest in new projects, if only to be able to retire old ones

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Chris Harris's avatar

Nobody's talked about energy policy very much in this country, or about using domestic energy resources to power industrial development and wean us off the slow puncture of petroleum imports, since the days of Rob Muldoon. Yet it has come back to bite us with our gasfield depletion, which seems to be about as significant as the winding down of North Sea Oil in the UK, a phenomenon similarly overlooked in contemporary discussions of Britain's present malaise, as if nobody remembers the seventies. Does Energy Policy mind if I use one of the graphs, in particular the gas depletion graph, in a post of my own?

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