Auckland power cuts

I don't live in Auckland, so I have no exciting tales to tell about yesterday's power cut and how it was (or wasn't) the end of civilisation. What I do have to say, however, is going to annoy a lot of Aucklanders. And that is "bad weather happens, get over it".

Down here south of the Bombay Hills, we understand this fact, and while we don't like losing our power or ADSL connections, we know that its just one of those Bad Things that happens, like earthquakes, or National governments. Sure, you can bitch about it, but expecting it to change is simply playing Canute.

As for all the talk about how there is a "single line" into Auckland, and how this is an unacceptable vulnerability, it is no different anywhere else in the country. Every electron going into Wellington, for example, comes through Haywards, and there is scope for a similar act there to plunge the entire lower North Island into darkness (particularly when we are drawing on power from the southern hydro lakes over the Cook Strait cable). But you don't see Wellingtonians complaining about their vulnerability; we just accept it as a fact of technological life.

Palmerston North is slightly better off, because we have at least 150 MW of wind up there on the hill feeding directly into the local grid. But there'll still be a single point of failure there somewhere, and when the wind isn't blowing there'll be a SPOF somewhere (out by Bunnythorpe, I think) where the national grid connects to the local.

Christchurch? Everything goes through a big substation out past Hornby way, and if something happens there, it gets very cold and very dark in most of Canterbury.

Or of course there's always that lovely big single point of failure down there at Benmore, where the power goes into the grid at the first place.

Everywhere is on a "single wire" - it's a natural consequence of the top-down heirarchical design of our electricity network, where power flows from the national grid, through regional ones and down to local networks. Everyone accepts this - except Aucklanders. I can only suggest that they get over themselves. And if they can't, and want to move to a radically decentralised "web" model, with more local generation and greater crosslinking, then I suggest they stump up and start paying for it. But the chances of that happening are about as great as the chances of them paying for their own roads...