|
|
STEVE LOWE visits the Chatham Islands to review the community’s generation and discovered the country’s highest electricity bills and a desperate bid to improve security of supply and keep residents from leaving.
A power pole has caught fire and knocked everything off the board. Chief electrician Ian Sanson is away on a job in the island settlement of Kaingaroa and they are trying to contact him. Mark Fitzgerald, one of only three staff employed by Chatham Islands Electricity (CIEL) pulls the fuses, isolating the offending pole and a short spur. Within 20 minutes all but a few houses are back on and later that afternoon everybody has been reconnected. The Chathams are isolated and exposed out in the Pacific, some 800 kilometres east of Christchurch. Just two of the 10 Islands are inhabited – Chatham and Pitt. The town of Waitangi is the main settlement with some 200 residents with facilities that include a hospital with resident doctor, bank, several stores, and engineering and marine services. The main shipping wharf is located here. Thanks to the small but dedicated team, electricity supply on the main island is remarkably reliable and outages are few and far between, considering the age of the generators, which go back to the days when they supplied the island meat works (closed in the early 1990s when government subsidies were removed).
The Waitangi power station is the sole source of generation, with an installed capacity of 1.1MW from five units that consume anything up to 1500 litres of diesel a day. The price of diesel landed on the island is high and volatile and some residents claim it has been held artificially high by the one oil concession which effectively held a monopoly. More recently the Chatham Islands Enterprise Trust has started importing oil in another ship and has provided 480,000 litres of storage on the harbour at Waitangi, and in so doing has introduced competition. The price of oil on the Chathams, subject to the barrel price, has at last started to come down.
The small number of consumers also means high line charges. In Waitangi they pay around $18 a month for line charges, but Kaingaroa residents pay $120 a month and that’s before even switching on a light. If Port Hutt ever gets connected – the 18 kilometres of reticulation is a long time coming due to its questionable viability – the customers will probably have to contribute to the cost. Kaingaroa is a tiny community in the northeast of the main island that is so isolated, and so small, it is very unlikely it will ever be connected to the island’s main grid. The residents have been dependent on an ancient 200kVA generator for their power that was operated by a fish processing company, which has since pulled out with very little notice, leaving the community with no jobs. CIEL has installed a new 60kVA unit next to the old one which the community is buying and plans to operate after quite a few “irregular connections” have meters and circuit breakers attached to them.
The Enterprise Trust and the Power Company worked up a plan for a substantial hydro-electric scheme on the Te Awainanga River. Expected to cost in excess of $20 million, the previous New Zealand government encouraged the Trust to pursue it. Funding plans were later dropped and the Trust left to bear the unrecoverable costs of the abandoned project and the attention turned to wind turbines. In December 2008, CBD Energy of Australia won the bid over Kiwi competitor Windflow to supply two 200kw wind turbines to provide most of the power on the island with an installed power of 400kW under a 20-year agreement. Expected to be commissioned by Christmas, the turbines won’t reduce the monthly domestic bills much, but it mitigates against the risk of future oil price hikes. Meanwhile, the plans for a river hydro project have been revised and a more modest scheme could now provide, in the first phase, around 55kW more of installed power. The Te Awainanga river flows reliably for most of the year, but in January and February frequently falls below 200 litres per second and the narrow steep-sided course of the river offers little opportunity for storage. The Trust and some interested farmers are also experimenting with rapeseed for producing biodiesel that will supplement imported fuel. So, in future another beautiful yellow flower might replace the island’s gorse, and those residents who have hung on, might be beginning to see light at the end of a long dark tunnel.
Energy NZ No.11 Summer 2009 |
Within a mere hour of arriving in the Corvair Combi van that serves the Chatham Islands there’s a power outage that affects the whole community.
However, the cost of electricity to the 612 individuals who reside on Chatham Island is unbearably high: 73 cents per unit in August 2009. This is having a big negative impact on the community and the population is declining because of it. Paul, a mechanic who came to the island with his wife and child in response to a newspaper advertisement, doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stay and he puts the cost of electricity high on his list of reasons to pack up and leave. Not suprisingly, households are frugal electricity users and typically use compact fluorescent lamps throughout and don’t use electricity to cook or to heat water, but still have pay around $250 a month for electricity. Owen Pickles, manager of the Chatham Islands Council, confided he had installed two heatpumps and that his bill last winter had risen to $600 a month.
There are also other factors beside oil prices that contribute to the big power bills. The reticulation is rusted from the salt winds that lash the island for much of the year (although a big replacement programme is in progress), and losses on the grid are high, around 13 percent overall. The considerable spacing between properties also means each has to have its own transformer.
The rest of the island needs more than another diesel generator if it is to have security of supply. One solution could be for businesses and homeowners to install local, renewable generators such as wind and solar, but, as Terry Tuanui, chairman of CIEL, says what the island really needs is “consumers”.