We don't need the fast track to kill fossil fuels

RNZ has a story this morning about the expansion of solar farms in Aotearoa, driven by today's ground-breaking ceremony at the Tauhei solar farm in Te Aroha:

From starting out as a tiny player in the electricity system, solar power generated more electricity than coal and gas combined for the first time over summer, albeit only for a few days, according to the Electricity Authority.

Overall, solar farms generate just 2 per cent of the country's power now, but by 2030 Meridian Energy thinks it will be 7 to 8 per cent.

Which is roughly what we generate with wind ATM. Or gas. In fact, solar will overtake gas in terms of generation capacity within two years. Here's MBIE's breakdown of generation capacity to 2023 (excludes hydro):

Source: MBIE, Energy in New Zealand 2024, p24.

Look at that beautiful exponential curve for solar! And it gets better: total solar capacity in December 2024 was 573MW. There's another 463MW currently under construction, and 130MW which will start building in August, all of which will be built by the end of 2027. Throw in a couple of hundred MW of distributed generation, and there will be more solar than gas. The same is also true of wind, which has 262MW under construction and scheduled for completion by the end of 2027, and there's 300MW of batteries under construction to remove the need for peaking power. All of which means that we're going to be burning a lot less gas in a couple of years.

And the kicker: this has all been done without National's fast-track bill. The government has claimed that its corrupt, Muldoonist, anti-environment law is necessary to boost renewable energy, but clearly it is not. So when big generators claim that the world will end because their latest big stupid project has been rightly refused resource consent, they are lying. We don't need to allow corruption or compromise the rule of law in Aotearoa to get a green future; the market is pushing that perfectly well. Instead, Contact is fighting over who gets the money from that revolution: them or someone else. And none of us should really give a single wet shit about that. There's plenty of other wind projects waiting to be built, and we'll just build them instead.