Originally Posted by
xafalcon
I don't think the Tiwai Point smalter closing would be a benefit to all.
Power company shareholders (the Mums & Dads the government promoted the IPO towards), regardless of the company, would get hammered. MEL more so due to HVDC link transmission constraints. Those nice dividends that we & the government enjoy would be slashed and the SP would head south effecting NZ Super fund. Bluff and Southland economies would get hammered, thousands of jobs would be effected directly or indirectly, social welfare costs increase, all when the Chch rebuild is starting to wind down. It would be a major economic shock in 2017 if the smelter were to close. Bill's surplus would be gone, and it's an election year
The smelter is not the problem. The real problem is the huge difference in electricity price paid by the smelter v's Joe Bloggs (domestic supply profit much much greater than Tiwai supply profit [if there is any]), and the individual cost components being hidden in domestic kWhr pricing (allows each cost contributor to point the finger at someone else, accountants are very good at that).
My read is that those 3 new transformers currently being installed are a sign that the smelter isn't closing anytime soon, but the shift towards distributed generation will slowly accelerate because no company on the supply side will voluntarily reduce their margins, and there was such fierce industry opposition to separating out the individual cost components of the kWhr price (even though they already do it for large commercial customers). However this PV solar is a long game, due to high entry cost of distributed generation. ie. $6k investment for a tiny 1.5kW system