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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

Political is right. In NZ, the Onslow pumped hydro scheme was just cancelled by the incoming right wing-ish government, with no comprehensible rationale given [0]

> “On top of its $16 billion price tag, the Lake Onslow scheme would run into likely issues with consenting and it wouldn’t be delivered for at least another decade.

It will cost a lot and take a while. Duh. Show me the numbers. And govt can modify the consenting regime.

> “Industry experts warned that if the scheme went ahead it would have a chilling effect on the pipeline of renewable electricity generation New Zealand needs to reach our climate goals.

Please explain how something that can store renewable electricity has a chilling effect on renewables.

[0] https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/lake-onslow-pumped-hydro...

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The Onslow pumped hydro scheme is estimated to store 4,000 – 11,000 GWh, with an estimated cost of $16 billion NZD (9.7 billion USD), and be delivered in (at least) 10 years time. Is that a cost of $881-2450 USD per kwhr?

I presume there is ample room for cost blowouts as well.

LiPo cells are currently costing about $110 to 130/kWh (USD), and trending downwards. Now large scale storage batteries are more than just the cells (Tesla megapacks are selling for 1.39M for 3.916 MW or about $410/kwhr), and cells probably wear out quicker than a dam, but it seems the Onslow scheme is not giving great bang for buck. The best you could say for it is that a lot of the spend would stay in NZ because a lot of the spend is in labour.

Am I missing something? Is my math wrong? It seems to me spending 16 billion becoming experts in assembling large scale batteries would be a better long term investment for NZ. And they can get access to the storage as it is build, instead of waiting 10 years.

https://www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/28349-identifying-poten...

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack

Your math is off by three orders of magnitude. The scale of the Onslow pumped hydro scheme is in billions of kWh, not in millions of kWh.

https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/business/about/our-researc...

Indeed the above puts it as having 8TWh storage capacity (and perhaps 1.2GW power). Longer duration storage, with low cost to hold the energy (which hopefully does not evaporate too much during the bountiful times).

Thanks for the correction. So this pumped hydro storage is at least 200x cheaper per kWh than current LiPo based solutions.

We already have massive storage in New Zealand - our existing hydro lakes.

What we need is solar installations. Reducing outflows is exactly the same as increasing storage.

AFAIK the problem is that regulations (plus the obligation to kowtow to maori interests) is preventing solar installations from going ahead. It isn't an issue of money, because I happen to know one private enterprise happy to invest half a billion to build out utility solar if they could get the necessary approvals. It isn't due to our conservative government - the same problem occurred under Labour+Greens. And our lakes when full can hold months of storage - in theory they would only need to spill for irrigation or ecological reasons or maybe during short flood periods.

> AFAIK the problem is that regulations (plus the obligation to kowtow to maori interests) is preventing solar installations from going ahead.

You'll have to be more specific than that dodgy statement, it kind of undermines your good point. What obligations are you referring to, outside the resource management regime, which is most definitely "regulations"?

I'm not involved with the project so I can't give you more than the vague impression I got as an outsider.

My general experience is that the NZ government tends to think big and blow money on wasteful initiatives while not identifying clearly advantageous initiatives and backing those (or otherwise encouraging the good stuff). That said, I have been pleasantly surprised with the broadband rollout (which helped during COVID).

By under bidding its energy against renewables, earned from gas and coal?

I don't entirely understand it either but the same reasoning is used by green opposition to snow2.0 to argue against it, a product of the turnbull LNP era government.

Damage to the national park during construction is the icing on the cake.

The incoming government didn't cancel the scheme. They cancelled the investigation into the scheme which was due to report in late-2024 (I think).

The investigation would have covered other options as well.

They didn't save billions, they save a million and threw away the work done

Meanwhile your neighbours over here created a political foil in the shape of nuclear reactors and are coming in swinging for a presumptive election this year saying that is the way forward

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