The energetic productivity problem. Adding low productivity energy systems. Can arts and culture survive? Will debt become unsustainable and collapse the economy?
I love that you are taking an NZ look at the energy question. The Great Simplification is going to be different in different places. The doubling of energy demand over the next 25 years seems unfathomable, the techno utopia wants us to believe that this will all work out.
Something about our hydro schemes, I have read that they have a life span of 80-120 years. Do we need to rebuild them soon, karapiro was built in 1947?
I not sure I 💯 agree with hierarchy of art, we have historical artefacts of art being made by many cultures with lower energy foot prints. There is art and artistry to be found and made in the everyday. But I do take your point that if there is a struggle for survival then making great works is less of a priority.
Thanks for taking the time to write about these issues
Great comments thank you. I think the art analogy is more in the sense of art as a profession, which is enabled by the productivity of the food production system that provides surplus and frees up time. But I also agree art has been a feature of all ancient cultures.
Also a great point on the dams. I have not looked into this but like all things they too suffer the effects of entropy over time. I suspect there is some lifecycling that needs to occur. I am not sure that the fractured nature of the energy market can accomodate this.
The doubling of energy comes from the compounding growth of GDP and the essentially perfect correlation between the change in GDP = change in net primary energy.
Thanks for reading and I appreciate your thoughtful comments.
Good point on hydro reinvestment. Arapuni dam was built in 1929 and is currently requiring constant fingers-in-the-dike R & M. It badly needs decommissioning and replacement. I don't see Genesis undertaking the mammoth job of replacing the Waikato dams under the present market set-up, nor adding extra coal thermal capacity at Huntly which is a must. A hybrid Government-market model is the only structure that can deliver the generation capacity that NZ requires but a reformulation like that lies outside the consensus reality.
Spot on Tony and this is my concern which I think is summed up well by the how did you go bankrupt quote "two ways, gradually then suddenly". What you raise here is the tipping point from gradually to suddenly.
The oldest operational dam in the world is 3500 years old. At least six Roman dams are still operational.
Properly built dams with reliable spillways can last a very long time. But sedimentation certainly is a problem and is not being taken seriously enough. I doubt of any dams in New Zealand will need replacement as such within the foreseeable future. What we do need is that dam designer and builders designed them for a life of hundreds of years rather than the 150 years which seems to be the maximum now.
Hydro looks good because the impacts are hidden at least in the short term, there is a reason why dams are being removed all over the world. I'll give one example the Patea Dam was built in 1984, but when consented in 2010 it had lost half of its capacity through sediment buildup and projections were that in another 30 years it would be a river again (no storage). The environmental impacts are huge but unmentioned mostly. some detail here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321094881_Damn_the_dams
Agree, Mike, hydro impacts are massive and should by no means be overlooked. In fact I helped get the Water Conservation Order legislation put in place decades ago to make sure that all our best wild & scenic rivers were not dammed. A couple of years ago I also floated the idea that when the Arapuni dam is decommissioned it should not be rebuilt in order to recover the fabled Arapuni Rapids that were one of the most outstanding sights on the old, pre-hydro Waikato River, link here: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15MDbhbm2q/
I remember a Tony Brunt when I was an early VP party member, before becoming chair of an electricity supply authority. Got the manifesto somewhere. My next-door neighbours were Jack and Elsie Locke. Rod Donald was frequent visitor in the Avon Loop. Good to see you here on @NewZealandEnergy. Sadly, the subject of electricity has become political.
Hydro electricity and the associated transmission lines have long been NZ's biggest economic asset; sadly privatised by free booting marketeers. While I also personally opposed the damming of Lake Manapouri with a dam (dat Piet van de beroemed vinger noemt dijk) I am pleased that it is in place and operating.
I say it is enough already to send the overstayer Comalco home and NZ has a large surplus of hydroelectricity 24/7 right here right now. Solar and Wind are poor performing environmental nightmares and a waste of overseas currency. Nuclear is still dangerous to health and should be left in the Northern hemisphere
"On March 5, 1959, Charles Turner, engineer-in-chief of the Ministry of Works, addressed the Southland Progress League in Invercargill. The country’s prosperity, he told the meeting, was “balanced on too narrow a base”. The time was ripe for “exporting our rainfall in some other form than meat and wool”. New Zealand needed to turn one of its chief natural resources—water—into electricity, and “farm” that electricity to produce the industrial materials the world wanted." via Wiki - so let history repeat
Thanks for your article. This is such an interesting field, and is evolving all the time making EROEI calculations more challenging. E.g. recycling of critical elements continues to improve (https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/17/new-battery-recycling-process-from-china-recovers-99-99-of-lithium/), dramatically lowering the energy cost for making say a battery. Then there's systems like the Terraformer, which takes intermittent renewable power and creates cheap natural gas (https://www.terraformindustries.com). One key issue I don't see talked about is the EROEI in food - this may become a big problem as the EROEI of liquid fuels approaches 1:1
Excellent comment. As I tried to note EROI is a difficult metric to evaluate as the boundaries of analysis are often not obvious or are intentionally obscured.
the problem with the fertilser crisis stories is they look at the current animal dominated food system where the vast majority of the fertiliser energy goes to feeding animals, take that away and feeding the world without synthetic nitrogen is no longer such a big problem
Remember Sri Lanka who tried this virtue signaling in 2021? They were self sufficient for food before eliminating nitrogen fertilizer. That worked well for them, right?
Thanks Andrew, I think about degrowth a lot. I really struggle to see how it would work. Purely from an entropy perspective more energy is needed just to maintain as time goes on. Then there are the political implications and the social unrest. It's highly likely that there will be a degrowth of some form I hope it is much less chaotic and violent than I anticipate it will be.
Thanks Mike! very much appreciated. I recently listened to Jean Baptiste Fressoz on another platform, very insightful. Along similar line this is also fascinating and influenced me a lot in writing this article which I have been thinking about for some time now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M01Q3ZR-Mzs
The biggest social change at grass roots level since the industrial revolution has to be micro processors and the pocket phone. Electricity is critical .Given it all emanates from our nuclear blasting sun Earth is well placed to survive the demand on supply for at least another 300,000* years.
In the immediate short term the political decision to extend the life of the polluter at Tiwai out to 2035 was a shocker. Take Tiwai out of the equation NZ has a surplus of hydro electricity 24/7 and the sunk investment has already repaid the taxpayer investor multi-fold.
Thanks Winston, the energy flows from the sun are phenomenal. It can be argued that it is concentrated ancient sunlight that has gotten us to where we are now. The challenge is how to effectively harness the daily flows of the sun in the future with out lots machines.
Just reading my electricity bill. No envelope and postage stamp. All on my pocket brain and the worst part is the meter reading - done remotely from Hamilton - is 4% and Vector have bundled it up (the guaranteed income stream) and sold it to an off-shore investor for undisclosed millions
There are lots of good reasons for keeping the smelter. The very high cost of reinforcing a transmission all the way to Auckland is but one of them. If we shut down the smelter now about 1/3 of the power would have to be dumped
Brian I am sure you already know - Gas can be stored and used for heat and light and the pipelines and pigs already exist for once were coal-gas but now LPG. The late John McKenze JP as Hearing Officer for the consent authority heard and consented BP's application for the LPG pipeline between Port Lyttelton and Woolston
Renewables are inherently dilute energy, require constant fossil fuel back up (battery back up is a farce), take up hundreds of acres of scarce land, add enormous complexity to any grid and recieve massive government and corporate subsidies due to getting tax breaks for every kilowatt hour produced. In every country and state (USA) as renewable generation increases, electricity rates have crept up for industry (deindustralization) and the general population affecting the poor disproportionately. Germany and UK are now basket cases and a few short years ago were the powerhouses of the world in terms of industry. Coal and geothermal are your only answers for the short term until you turn to gas and eventually nuclear? (Though, given Kiwis fierce opposition to all things nuclear I doubt this will happen 😉).
I married a NZ girl in 1977 in Taupo and worked for 8 years at NZAS in Invercargill as we raised a family.
Thanks William, there is a recent JP Morgan energy report that pretty much says exactly this. The try to be diplomatic but the charts tell the story. Thanks for your comments!
Thanks for sharing this Mike. This is exactly the sort of article that prompted me to start writing and to try and help people understand these pieces better.
Firstly, all "fuels" are free, it's the energy required to extract them that is not free. The same applies to wind and solar. The iron law of this is low energy density = high resource intensity. This is where the cost is.
As for storage being a game changer this is true. Intermittency is expensive. But grid scale storage with low entropy is a mythical thing yet to be invented and will be a battle against physics, so I do not expect this to happen any time soon.
I love that you are taking an NZ look at the energy question. The Great Simplification is going to be different in different places. The doubling of energy demand over the next 25 years seems unfathomable, the techno utopia wants us to believe that this will all work out.
Something about our hydro schemes, I have read that they have a life span of 80-120 years. Do we need to rebuild them soon, karapiro was built in 1947?
I not sure I 💯 agree with hierarchy of art, we have historical artefacts of art being made by many cultures with lower energy foot prints. There is art and artistry to be found and made in the everyday. But I do take your point that if there is a struggle for survival then making great works is less of a priority.
Thanks for taking the time to write about these issues
Great comments thank you. I think the art analogy is more in the sense of art as a profession, which is enabled by the productivity of the food production system that provides surplus and frees up time. But I also agree art has been a feature of all ancient cultures.
Also a great point on the dams. I have not looked into this but like all things they too suffer the effects of entropy over time. I suspect there is some lifecycling that needs to occur. I am not sure that the fractured nature of the energy market can accomodate this.
The doubling of energy comes from the compounding growth of GDP and the essentially perfect correlation between the change in GDP = change in net primary energy.
Thanks for reading and I appreciate your thoughtful comments.
Good point on hydro reinvestment. Arapuni dam was built in 1929 and is currently requiring constant fingers-in-the-dike R & M. It badly needs decommissioning and replacement. I don't see Genesis undertaking the mammoth job of replacing the Waikato dams under the present market set-up, nor adding extra coal thermal capacity at Huntly which is a must. A hybrid Government-market model is the only structure that can deliver the generation capacity that NZ requires but a reformulation like that lies outside the consensus reality.
Spot on Tony and this is my concern which I think is summed up well by the how did you go bankrupt quote "two ways, gradually then suddenly". What you raise here is the tipping point from gradually to suddenly.
The oldest operational dam in the world is 3500 years old. At least six Roman dams are still operational.
Properly built dams with reliable spillways can last a very long time. But sedimentation certainly is a problem and is not being taken seriously enough. I doubt of any dams in New Zealand will need replacement as such within the foreseeable future. What we do need is that dam designer and builders designed them for a life of hundreds of years rather than the 150 years which seems to be the maximum now.
Hydro looks good because the impacts are hidden at least in the short term, there is a reason why dams are being removed all over the world. I'll give one example the Patea Dam was built in 1984, but when consented in 2010 it had lost half of its capacity through sediment buildup and projections were that in another 30 years it would be a river again (no storage). The environmental impacts are huge but unmentioned mostly. some detail here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321094881_Damn_the_dams
Agree, Mike, hydro impacts are massive and should by no means be overlooked. In fact I helped get the Water Conservation Order legislation put in place decades ago to make sure that all our best wild & scenic rivers were not dammed. A couple of years ago I also floated the idea that when the Arapuni dam is decommissioned it should not be rebuilt in order to recover the fabled Arapuni Rapids that were one of the most outstanding sights on the old, pre-hydro Waikato River, link here: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15MDbhbm2q/
I remember a Tony Brunt when I was an early VP party member, before becoming chair of an electricity supply authority. Got the manifesto somewhere. My next-door neighbours were Jack and Elsie Locke. Rod Donald was frequent visitor in the Avon Loop. Good to see you here on @NewZealandEnergy. Sadly, the subject of electricity has become political.
Hydro electricity and the associated transmission lines have long been NZ's biggest economic asset; sadly privatised by free booting marketeers. While I also personally opposed the damming of Lake Manapouri with a dam (dat Piet van de beroemed vinger noemt dijk) I am pleased that it is in place and operating.
I say it is enough already to send the overstayer Comalco home and NZ has a large surplus of hydroelectricity 24/7 right here right now. Solar and Wind are poor performing environmental nightmares and a waste of overseas currency. Nuclear is still dangerous to health and should be left in the Northern hemisphere
"On March 5, 1959, Charles Turner, engineer-in-chief of the Ministry of Works, addressed the Southland Progress League in Invercargill. The country’s prosperity, he told the meeting, was “balanced on too narrow a base”. The time was ripe for “exporting our rainfall in some other form than meat and wool”. New Zealand needed to turn one of its chief natural resources—water—into electricity, and “farm” that electricity to produce the industrial materials the world wanted." via Wiki - so let history repeat
You have to be over a certain age to remember me, Winston. Good to see your synapses are still firing efficiently 😊.
thanks Tony great information
The title reminded me of the old adage: communism, Great idea, Wrong species.
Thanks for your article. This is such an interesting field, and is evolving all the time making EROEI calculations more challenging. E.g. recycling of critical elements continues to improve (https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/17/new-battery-recycling-process-from-china-recovers-99-99-of-lithium/), dramatically lowering the energy cost for making say a battery. Then there's systems like the Terraformer, which takes intermittent renewable power and creates cheap natural gas (https://www.terraformindustries.com). One key issue I don't see talked about is the EROEI in food - this may become a big problem as the EROEI of liquid fuels approaches 1:1
Excellent comment. As I tried to note EROI is a difficult metric to evaluate as the boundaries of analysis are often not obvious or are intentionally obscured.
Food production will be a major challenge as you rightly highlight. I recommend the following article for more on this topic and a real time example of the loss of an energy input to the food system. https://brawlstreetjournal.substack.com/p/europe-fertilizer-crisis-ammonia-opec
Thank you for sharing the links. EROI can be improved but low energy density primary sources will always require high resource intensity to harness.
Thanks for the great comment!
the problem with the fertilser crisis stories is they look at the current animal dominated food system where the vast majority of the fertiliser energy goes to feeding animals, take that away and feeding the world without synthetic nitrogen is no longer such a big problem
Remember Sri Lanka who tried this virtue signaling in 2021? They were self sufficient for food before eliminating nitrogen fertilizer. That worked well for them, right?
How could anyone be ‘self sufficient’ with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer made from fossilgas that is the definition of unsustainable
This article is a sound argument for a degrowth policy. The long depression that is feared is not inevitable.
Thanks Andrew, I think about degrowth a lot. I really struggle to see how it would work. Purely from an entropy perspective more energy is needed just to maintain as time goes on. Then there are the political implications and the social unrest. It's highly likely that there will be a degrowth of some form I hope it is much less chaotic and violent than I anticipate it will be.
Great article thanks NZE here is a fantastic podcast on the "Energy Transition" https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/jean-baptiste-fressoz?mc_cid=8f16063c88&mc_eid=98cd889633 the book hes talking about is brilliant https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/more-and-more-and-more-9780241718896
Thanks Mike! very much appreciated. I recently listened to Jean Baptiste Fressoz on another platform, very insightful. Along similar line this is also fascinating and influenced me a lot in writing this article which I have been thinking about for some time now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M01Q3ZR-Mzs
Thanks for the great feedback.
The biggest social change at grass roots level since the industrial revolution has to be micro processors and the pocket phone. Electricity is critical .Given it all emanates from our nuclear blasting sun Earth is well placed to survive the demand on supply for at least another 300,000* years.
In the immediate short term the political decision to extend the life of the polluter at Tiwai out to 2035 was a shocker. Take Tiwai out of the equation NZ has a surplus of hydro electricity 24/7 and the sunk investment has already repaid the taxpayer investor multi-fold.
* Homosapien presence
Thanks Winston, the energy flows from the sun are phenomenal. It can be argued that it is concentrated ancient sunlight that has gotten us to where we are now. The challenge is how to effectively harness the daily flows of the sun in the future with out lots machines.
Like cabbages do using photosynthesis 😃
Just reading my electricity bill. No envelope and postage stamp. All on my pocket brain and the worst part is the meter reading - done remotely from Hamilton - is 4% and Vector have bundled it up (the guaranteed income stream) and sold it to an off-shore investor for undisclosed millions
There are lots of good reasons for keeping the smelter. The very high cost of reinforcing a transmission all the way to Auckland is but one of them. If we shut down the smelter now about 1/3 of the power would have to be dumped
Not so Bryan. The electricity can be converted into gas
Then what do you do??
Brian I am sure you already know - Gas can be stored and used for heat and light and the pipelines and pigs already exist for once were coal-gas but now LPG. The late John McKenze JP as Hearing Officer for the consent authority heard and consented BP's application for the LPG pipeline between Port Lyttelton and Woolston
Renewables are inherently dilute energy, require constant fossil fuel back up (battery back up is a farce), take up hundreds of acres of scarce land, add enormous complexity to any grid and recieve massive government and corporate subsidies due to getting tax breaks for every kilowatt hour produced. In every country and state (USA) as renewable generation increases, electricity rates have crept up for industry (deindustralization) and the general population affecting the poor disproportionately. Germany and UK are now basket cases and a few short years ago were the powerhouses of the world in terms of industry. Coal and geothermal are your only answers for the short term until you turn to gas and eventually nuclear? (Though, given Kiwis fierce opposition to all things nuclear I doubt this will happen 😉).
I married a NZ girl in 1977 in Taupo and worked for 8 years at NZAS in Invercargill as we raised a family.
Thanks William, there is a recent JP Morgan energy report that pretty much says exactly this. The try to be diplomatic but the charts tell the story. Thanks for your comments!
Good article no doubt you will be analyzing the monthly generation reports from our major power gentailers
https://theconversation.com/renewables-are-cheap-so-why-isnt-your-power-bill-falling-252391?
Thanks for sharing this Mike. This is exactly the sort of article that prompted me to start writing and to try and help people understand these pieces better.
Firstly, all "fuels" are free, it's the energy required to extract them that is not free. The same applies to wind and solar. The iron law of this is low energy density = high resource intensity. This is where the cost is.
As for storage being a game changer this is true. Intermittency is expensive. But grid scale storage with low entropy is a mythical thing yet to be invented and will be a battle against physics, so I do not expect this to happen any time soon.