Harry Austin

As the new boat harbour for Whakatāne has been sensibly stopped, what else could the land be used for?

I would like to suggest that we help reduce climate change by the installation of a Big Battery.

Our neighbours across the Ditch in Australia have lots of them.

And a huge amount of solar of which a major proportion is on people’s homes.

So, trying to size would go somewhat like this.

Let us say there are 1000 homes in Whakatāne and if each home had 5 kilowattts of solar panels, then from data, which I have recorded from my solar system, they would generate approximately 8000 kilowatt hours a year or 8 megawatts each. This is approximately 21kWh a day.

Most of this power would be exported during the day, so it would make sense to store it locally and keep as back-up for major power outages and to put back into the grid during the evening and morning power peak demands.

Let us say that a home would use between 10-20kWh a day, for a day’s outage we would need to store between 10-20MWh.

A 1 megawatt hour battery costs between $503,730 and $1,001,520, so 20MWh’s of battery would be about $10,074,600 and $20,030,400

The money quoted in the Beacon for the boat harbour was $9.8 million from Whakatāne District Council and $13.9 million Kãnoa – a total of $23.7 million

To charge up the battery, we should utilise the big buildings around Whakatāne of which I would like to suggest the Hub building, the Bunnings building, the workshops across in Gateway Drive, the New World building, the Pak’n Save building and other workshops buildings around town.

I have just bought two new 450 W solar panels from a nationwide supplier at $135 each, which will be added to my system. They require 4.44 square metres per kW. So 1MW of generation requires 2222 panels which is $300,000 and occupies 10,844m² of roof space.

It would also generate an average of 4.2MWh’s daily electricity over a year.

One of the reasons for this letter is that I think it’s a waste of resources to build an LPG terminal to use fossil fuels to support the country’s electricity supply when lots of local solar on house rooftops can do the same thing and help to keep the country’s hydro lakes topped up.

It reduces the necessity to install new high-voltage lines as the power is generated where it is needed most of the time.

There will be naysayers about these ideas and those with vested interests that would lose out politically, financially, and controlling interests. But most people would gain from these ideas.

Big Batteries could also be installed in Ōpōtiki, Tãneatua, Te Kaha, Edgecumbe, Murupara and other places.

Please build on these ideas.