COST EXCEEDS TWO MILLIONS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19941, 27 October 1934, Page 9

COST EXCEEDS TWO MILLIONS

REVIEW OF OPERATIONS AT WAITAKI

Big Percentage Paid for Labour It has been estimated that the cost of the Waitaki scheme up to the present has been in the vicinity of £2.500,000. more than half of which has been expended in labour. In the first place borings, surveys, investigations and preliminary work generally absorbed a sum of £26,000, or 1.1 per cent of the total cost. The most important work, of course, was the construction of the dam, and the expenditure on this, including the addition of a cut-off wall as a precautionary measure in terms of the recommendation of the Swedish expert, Professor Hornell, has been £1,088,580, or 48.2 per cent, of the total cost. The power house building with the large intake attached to it cost £428,855, or 19 per cent, of the total, and to this has to be added an expenditure of £195,078, or 8.7 per cent, of the total for electrical installations and equipment inside or attached to the power house, these including the two turbines which will suffice for the early operation of the scheme, the huge control room and the transformers and other appurtenances. The tail race was erected at a cost of £63,835, or 2.9 per cent, of the total, while the establishment and appointment of the village of Waitaki Hydro cost no less than £25,400. Land to the value of £20,000 had to be purchased, and consequent on the flooding that will follow the filling of the lake, road deviations, reconstructions and bridge building had to be carried out at a cost of £29,360, or 1.3 per cent, of the whole outlay. These items bring the total to £1,877,108, and to them has to be added the cost of transmission lines already erected, one to Glenavy having been constructed at a cost of £104,604, making the total spent for this purpose £380,303. The actual total thus accounted for is £2,257,411. Labour Employed The works have given direct employment during the past six years to staff and employees varying in number between a minimum of 500 and a maximum of 1250. The indirect employment from works of this nature can be gauged from a few outstanding items in the cost of structure. The total cement consumed amounts to about 45,000 tons, .costing at the works, including railage, handling, etc., nearly £300,000, while the consumption of timber amounted to approximately 4,000,000 super feet, all of which has been handled by the railways, together with an additional 40,000 tons of other goods. On account of the lake blocking access to stations on the South Canterbury side of the river, a fine steel traffic bridge has been thrown across the Waitaki at the head of the lake, at a cost of about £15,000. This bridge has been named the Waitangi bridge, and was declared officially open by Sir James Parr on January 30, 1933. The total length of the bridge is 630 feet. There are seven concrete piers, and the central span of 210 feet is notable in that it is the longest truss road span in New Zealand. It is a strikinglooking structure, of a very attractive design, its appearance being greatly enhanced by the colour in which it has been finished—a colour which coincides perfectly with the blue-green of the turbulent waters of the river it spans.

Comparative Figures Greater significance is given to the costs quoted above by reference to other costs with respect to hydroelectric schemes in other parts of the Dominion, comparison with which shows that the outlay at Waitaki in proportion to the amount that will be made available and per unit of power is not xery great after all. New Zealand is well endowed with potential sources of water power. It is estimated that were there a market for it over 4,000.000h.p. could be developed In the South Island and 750,000h.p. in the North Island. The best single source of power in New Zealand is the Waikato River, where the potential power amounts to 250,000h.p., of which 160,000 can be obtained at Arapuni. When fully developed Arapuni will be the cheapest scheme in this country, in support of which the following figures may be quoted:—Present cost per h.p., £32 ss; cost per h.p. when 160,000h.p. developed, £2l 2s; average cost of existing New Zealand schemes, fuel and water, to date, £29 7s; cost of Walpori, £37 Is. Available figures show that the operating costs at one of the steam plants in New Zealand for 1931 were .393 pence per unit, without distribution costs. The operating costs, say on the Mangahao-Waikaremoana system, including operating costs at power station and transmission and substation costs, amounted to only .072 pence per unit in 1931, and .061 pence in 1932, and the total cost per unit sold, including capital charges, is only .372 pence. On the Coleridge system, inclusive of all charges, they amounted to .248 pence per unit sold.