Post in Introductions
Thanks for the invitation to be guest speaker this week 31 July to 6 August
My name is Richard Budd and I have been a councillor on Environment Canterbury
since 1995. In this term of council I have Chaired the Regional Planning
Committee and the Air Quality and Energy Portfolio. It is the relationship
between air quality and energy that I wish to discuss on the forum this week.
This is the second term that I have chaired the Air/Energy Portfolio with
responsibility for the 'Clean Heat' scheme. This scheme is an assistance
program to help people insulate their homes and replace polluting forms of
heating with clean heat sources. The scheme is removing 26,000 solid fuel
burners and open fires from Christchurch. We are well on the way with 10,000
already removed and improvement in air quality evident.
There has been a lot of discussion about removing a renewable fuel like fire
wood and putting people onto the national grid. This discussion is fuelled by
concern around the robustness of the electricity system. With recent snow falls
and power cuts to some country areas for extended periods these concerns have
come into sharp relief.
Is Environment Canterbury causing a problem cleaning up the air? Can the
electricity system cope with this extra heating load as well as the economic
growth occuring in the region? These questions were addressed in 2005 in the
Energy Forum run by ECan. A series of meetings to address energy related issues
in the Canterbury Region. An outcome of these meetings was the establishment of
the Canterbury Regional Energy Forum. The Forum objective is to address those
two key questions of the resiliance of the electricity network and the
reliability of supply.
This is a first for New Zealand. Since the deregulation of the electricity
market it has been difficult to plan at the regional level. Now with industry
representatives and organisations like the Centre for Advanced Engineering and
the Employers Chamber of Commerce we are making excellent progress.
Tomorrow I will start the week with the topic of transmission lines. This is
central to these discussions as while we plan to delay the construction of a
new line to Christchurch by peak load demand management, the question is when
not if this will be required.
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