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Transpower needs business support for its plans to upgrade the national electricity grid over the next five or six years. By Gavin Riley
Yet for decades upkeep and improvement of the grid has failed to match the increasing demand for electricity. Significant investment in the 1950s and 1960s began to decline in the 1970s, since when power usage has been rising steeply. Alarm bells sounded in 1998 when aged cables burned out and Auckland’s central business district suffered a crippling six-week power blackout – an event Transpower chairman Wayne Brown notes that was reported on the front pages of newspapers in countries around the globe, which could not believe that a small, modern nation had allowed such a crisis to happen in its largest city. That neglect is now being reversed and over the next five or six years it is hoped to upgrade the grid to the tune of $5 billion – almost double the $2.7 billion value of its total fixed assets. The project, described as the probably the biggest infrastructure project undertaken in New Zealand, was detailed from a suitably lofty height – the 28th floor of the Lumley Centre in Auckland’s inner city, when representatives of power companies joined local authorities, major contractors, bankers, investors and consultants and to hear Brown unveil details of the state-owned organisation’s plan to upgrade the national electricity grid over the next five or six years. In announcing the massive upgrade, Brown chose his Auckland audience carefully. “There are some fairly agitated people out there who see what we’re doing as something evil. I hope you, as informed people, will enter the debate,” he said in a likely reference to the aggressive public opposition to Transpower’s plan to erect giant pylons through the Waikato – a battle the state-owned enterprise won this year when it was given the go-ahead. It needs the backing of influential industry groups if Transpower is to win over decision-makers, particularly politicians, so he’s taking his support-seeking message round the country. Though best known for his chairing of Transpower and the Far North District Council, and for his previous leading role in implementing health-sector reforms, Brown is a registered engineer who in earlier years worked on road, power, tunnel and dam projects. And he has a reputation for getting things done. NZ Council for Infrastructure Development chief executive Stephen Selwood referred to him at the Auckland meeting as a “Mr Fixit”. So he can be expected to push through the grid upgrade, described by Selwood as, “very much catch-up investment” – an assessment with which Brown agrees. “The network is generally quite old yet it’s working harder than it has ever done,” said Brown. “We have some transformers that are 70 years old and they’ve got more load on them than ever before. It’s becoming harder and harder to get planned outage time. If you’re going to fix parts you must switch other parts off. It’s getting harder and harder to do that.” Replacing old transformers is not a simple matter. “A big transformer weighs 160 tonnes, costs $10 million and you wait 20 months for it because New Zealand is only a small player [in global terms],” Brown said. The national grid is made up of 11,800 kilometres of high-voltage lines, 178 substations, 41,000 towers, 1000 power transformers, and 2300 circuit-breakers. Its assets are located in the territories of all 85 regional, city and district councils. There are three major projects in the $5 billion spending plan:
Other schemes include a $99 million Otahuhu substation diversity project (2010 commissioning) and a $141 million Wairakei ring reinforcement (2013). There are also many other smaller upgrades across the country, totalling about $330 million, which are either recently completed, underway or planned. Listed in Transpower’s grid-reinforcement programme are between $1.5 and $2 billion for the wider reinforcing of supply to, through and beyond Auckland, $52 million in the lower North Island, $54 million currently underway on top of the $130 million already spent in the upper South Island, the previously mentioned $672 million HVDC line improvement, and a cost to be calculated for the lower South Island where eventually 1000MW of wind-generated power will come on stream. Increasing capacity into Auckland and beyond will involve not only the North Island grid upgrade and North Auckland and Northland reinforcement, but the Otahuhu substation diversity project. When Otahuhu is commissioned in June next year, the electricity supply to Auckland will be channelled through two substations instead of one (the other being Pakuranga), which should act as a safeguard against low-probability but high-impact events such as Auckland’s central business area six-week power blackout in 1998 when old cables burned out. The HVDC improvement is critical as the line is the only high-voltage transmission link between the South and North Islands. It balances the distribution of energy between islands, helping to carry electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed. At the line’s southern end, Benmore substation, improvements will include dramatically extending the switchyards. At its northern end, Haywards, pole 3 will replace the 44-year-old pole 1. Pole 3 will comprise state-of-the-art equipment (thyristor valves) and have a 700MW nominal rating. Construction of stage one will begin early next year and the remaining stages will be spread over a number of years. The Wairakei ring reinforcment involves building a new double-circuit 220kV line between Wairakei and Whakamaru by 2013 to facilitate the connection of up to 1000MW of new geothermal generation – a major industry in Taupo worth a billion dollars, according to Brown. Though the national-grid upgrade is a vital catch-up investment, Transpower knows only too well that its plans can engender fierce opposition and make it difficult to win over the decision-makers. With that in mind the forthright Brown made this closing appeal to his Auckland audience, “Don’t let us be marooned out there, because some of you actually want to earn money from this [the upgrade]. And it’s really dumb if you don’t support us.”
Energy NZ No.11 Summer 2009 |
For more than a century the national electricity grid has had a single, unchanging task – to bring power to the people. In that role it has become a vital component of the country’s infrastructure, crucial to the well-being of the economy.