ta545

Well there was a benevolent dictator in the recent past (upto 1995), when the grid was publicly owned.

My understanding is most wind was bought at a guarenteed price by the government at the time of construction, so a wind farm producing 1MWh gets paid say £40 regardless of the cost of electricity on the grid - even if marginal cost was £20/MWh

As users are then paying £90/MWh for gas, does the excess £50 go to the government or to the wind far owner?

It looks like there's just one HVDC interaliand link capable of sending 1.2GW, and dating back to 1964.

Why not install 7 more? That would allow the entire current demand for the entire of NZ to come from the south island.

10M USD per km, average 800km from centre of south island to Auckland, $8b in total. 43,000 GWh generation per years, that's just 2.5c per kWh over 10 years on your bill.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...

At some point there will be more bang for buck to increase the north/south capacity. The price they're talking seems to be very low compared with other infrastructure. Sure it takes 6 years to build two 2GW links, so build 4 or 6 in parallel.

What amazes me is the footnote that the total spending on net zero is just £50 billion. Lets assume it's more realistically £100b. That's less than the cost of HS2. It's less than the cost of decommissioning the existing civil nuclear plants when they reach their end of life. Its the cost of 12GW of nuclear power generation. It's 14 months energy subsidies.