Power planners 'In cuckoo land’

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33942, 8 September 1975, Page 14

Power planners 'In cuckoo land’

(N.Z. Press Association)

AUCKLAND, September 7.

The money required to build the Waiau Pa thermal station would provide a solar-panel hot-water heater for every home in the country, the Leader of the Values Party (Mr R. C. Clough) said today.

He was addressing a group of 33 Values Party election candidates at a two-day candidates’ school in Auckland.

Mr Clough said that the Clutha River and Waiau Pa schemes together were likely to cost more than slloom, almost as much as the total amount of capital investment to date in the generation of power in New Zealand.

He accused the Electricity Department planners of living in “cloud cuckoo land.”

“They have overlooked the fact that the circumstances which gave rise to the rapid growth in electricity consumption in the last 30 years simply no longer exist” In 1973, instead of the 7 per cent growth rate predicted by the Electricity Department there was an actual growth of 2.3 per cent. By 1974, the growth rate had declined by 1.4 per cent, said Mr Clough. “If growth rates of the last two years are more typical of the future than the growth rates of the last 30 years, then not only do we not have to have the Waiau Pa and Clutha River schemes, but we do not have to have nuclear power either,” he said.