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Hugh de Lacy looks at the most controversial project in the upgrade of the national grid, the new lines from Whakamaru to Auckland.
Few projects over the past decades have excited as much animosity as NIGUP, the North Island Grid Upgrade Project. It began six years ago when, emboldened by changes to the Resource Management Act which gave priority to projects of national interest, and by fears of a repeat of the catastrophic 1998 power shutdown in Auckland, state-owned grid operator Transpower announced its plans for the new line. There was no arguing for the need for the replacement line: much of the biggest city in the country descended into chaos for five weeks in 1998 when underground cables failed. Such a Third World embarrassment could not be allowed to be repeated in a modern and relatively wealthy country, but all that counted for nothing when the plans were initially unveiled. They involved a $500 million line of pylons 50 to 70 metres high and 20 metres wide – nearly twice the size of the pylons on the existing 220kV line – marching 185 kilometres across the countryside from Whakamaru on the Waikato River near Taupo to a new sub-station on Brown Hill Road in south-east Auckland. It would double the capacity of the antiquated and unreliable existing line, and a new underground cable would be installed from Brown Hill Road to the Pakuranga sub-station and, later, on to the Otahuhu sub-station.
And what a to-do those plans triggered. Protest groups like Halt (Homeowners Against Line Trespassers) and New Era Energy sprang up overnight to represent the 344 affected landowners. Demands were made that the new line be laid underground – the prohibitive cost of doing so notwithstanding – or that new cabling technology be adopted, alternative power sources created, or a fresh drive launched for household energy efficiency in Auckland. When Transpower stood firm against these ideas, protesters burned an effigy of the company’s then chief executive, Australian Ralph Craven, in the streets or Tirau, and public meetings that were called by the company to explain the issues were subjected to non-stop chants of “No pylons” – nobody could hear and nobody wanted to. When the effigy-burning extended to Prime Minister Helen Clark, and rumours circulated of sabotage and armed resistance, the Government stepped in, urging Electricity Commissioner Roy Hemingway to explore alternatives, and pointedly delaying his reporting date till after the 2005 election. Hemingway, an American, appeared at first to lance the boil, but also set himself at loggerheads with Craven, by reporting in April 2006 that Transpower had got it wrong, and that a mere $140 million investment could keep Auckland safely supplied until at least 2017.
With the Government firmly behind the new lines project, the Electricity Commission came up with an $824 million scheme to build a new 220kV line with the capacity to be upgraded later to 400kV, but still involving the bigger pylons. The focus of the nimby demonstrators then switched to the courtroom with the protest group New Energy Era using Hemingway’s charge of Government bias, and Transpower commissioner Graham Pinnell’s claim the company had over-estimated Auckland’s future power needs, to try to get the project dumped. New Era Energy lost – badly. Its case was thrown out of court by Justice John Wild in May 2009 and, facing court costs of $115,000 awarded against it, it dissolved into liquidation. By then the Labour-led Coalition Government had itself been consigned to the Opposition benches, and all the public blood-letting seemed to have assuaged the protesters’ fury. By then too Labour’s Economic Development Minister, Pete Hodgson, had turned the whole issue over to an independent Board of Inquiry which rubber-stamped the project in September of last year. Since then work has gone ahead rapidly. Vegetation clearing and visual landscape mitigation began at the end of last year, and in January construction started on a new Pakuranga sub-station and on the pylons’ foundations. The first of the 425 pylons appeared on the Waikato skyline at Mangatangi in May this year, and a month later excavation began on the 10 kilometre underground cable route from Brownhill Road to the Pakuranga sub-station. Construction will start on the Brownhill Road sub-station in October, and stringing of the transmission line will begin in May of next year. Once that’s finished the existing Arapuni-Pakuranga overhead line will be dismantled, and by the autumn of 2012 the whole project will be completed and the security of Auckland’s power supply ensured for the foreseeable future. The focus then will have to switch to upgrading other parts of the antiquated national grid. The overall lesson of the fight over NIGUP has been not to let such vital infrastructure as the nation’s power grid get so badly run down as was the case in the 1980s and 1990s, because playing catch-up a couple of decades later simply intensifies public resistance. Successive governments have created an environment in which new generation capacity is keeping well ahead of rising demand, but it’s all to no avail if the distribution network is not steadily upgraded to keep pace.
Energy NZ Vol.4 No.5 September-October 2010 |
Even in a nation where “Not in my backyard” is a reflexive mantra in the face of planned developments public and private, protests over Transpower’s new Whakamaru to Auckland 400kV overhead transmission line reached almost unprecedented intensity from affected landowners.
No one had much problem with the underground sections, least of all the Aucklanders who also suffered a lesser power-cut in 2006, but the overhead line would cross some of the country’s most valuable farmland, skirting the rural towns of Tokoroa, Putaruru, Tirau, Morrinsville, Hunua and Clevedon.
But two months later a shackle failed on an earth line on a pylon at Otahuhu tripping the substation and half of Auckland was blacked out for five hours, sparking memories of the 1998 debacle. This pitched Hemingway into a head-to-head battle with Energy Minister David Parker, the upshot of which was that Hemingway’s contract was not renewed when it expired in August that year. He was, in effect, fired.