In yesterday’s post, we saw that the sudden freeing up of 13% of New Zealand’s electricity supply will lead to questions as to what the heck to do with it all.

Some further deets and thunking:

First, the South Island of New Zealand is not short of electricity, so if new uses are not found for it down there, it has to be sent towards the North Island. (Yes, I know, very creative names for the two main islands. The maori names are much more poetic.)

However, the infrastructure for this scale of electricity transportation doesn’t currently exist and would need to be built. Plans are underfoot already.

There are also possibilities for switching fossil fuel burning to renewable electricity in the South:

“Meridian Energy spokeswoman Claire Shaw said it was "well-documented" the dairy industry used coal boilers in the South Island to dry milk into milk powder.
“Those boilers could be replaced with electric boilers to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
"Earlier this year Synlait commissioned its first electrode boiler at its Dunsandel site," she notes.”

This idea to use this newly available electricity to replace fossil fuel burning is a clear winner. If New Zealand did this well, it could probably get pretty close to 100% renewable electricity. It’s already up at around 80%.

Second, my snarkiness about the Finance minister yesterday was exaggerated; he did also have better ideas for the future than just “building data centres”:

“…the prospect of New Zealand using renewable energy to derive hydrogen from water, which could then be exported to power fuel cells.”

Excuse my facetiousness, Grant.

Third, on the electric car front I brought up yesterday, obviously I’m not the only one to have thunked it:

“The uptake of electric vehicles, which require far fewer components than conventional cars, is changing the economics of car manufacturing, for example, raising the prospect that car assembly could come back to New Zealand.
“Perhaps the region that schooled Burt Munro, the creator of the "world's fastest Indian", and Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, the entrepreneur that got New Zealand into the space industry could pull another rabbit out of the hat.

Almost gives you warm fuzzies, that does.