Absurd Solar Consent Requirements Driving Up Power Bills
ACT has obtained details of the resource consents for solar farms in Central Hawke's Bay, which include requirements such as:
Inviting mana whenua to perform karakia before removing any native trees or plants from the site.
Providing written reports every six months until two years after construction is finished, outlining compliance with a 66-page Cultural Impact Assessment—with ongoing reporting beyond that.
Submitting a detailed landscaping plan specifying:
Every plant's botanical and common name.
Exact location, spacing, and planter bag size.
Soil preparation methods and planting techniques.
The type and quality of materials used for planting like soil, mulch, stakes, and ties.
A requirement to replace any dead plant with the same or similar species at the same size.
Constructing a ' public viewing area ' with off-street parking, and informational and educational signage.
"This is what's driving up your power bill. Councils say they want renewable energy, but then demand ceremonial chanting and spreadsheet-level detail about every shrub on site," says Court.
'One of the companies forced to deal with these absurd demands went bankrupt. How many more projects just never get built at all?
'All this while New Zealanders shiver in the cold, unable to pay their power bills and threatened with blackouts. We need more power generation, whatever form that takes. That requires freedom to build, and ditching this rubbish.
'We see the same thing happening with supermarkets, IKEA, even hospitals. This madness raises prices at the checkout and on power bills.
'We should be rolling out the welcome mat for anyone who wants to deliver more, cheaper power. Instead, we're burying them in demands based on metaphysical concepts and box-ticking reports.
'That's why ACT is committed to scrapping the beast that is the RMA and replacing it with a system based on property rights, without a general Treaty principles clause so we can build the things we need to make our lives better and more affordable.'
The Resource Consent for the Centralines Limited project could power roughly 7,500 homes per year. Consent here.
The Resource Consent for the Skysolar Limited (now in liquidation) project would power 18,000 homes per year. Consent here.
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Ministers in a hypothetical second term may find themselves spending much of their days arguing with the Act party over why they're ignoring a regulations report arguing for change to this or that regulation. As an exasperated Boston described the effect of the law on a future government: 'why would multiple ministers want to make themselves look stupid not just once, but repeatedly, every year from here on potentially until eternity?'. Members of this group are concerned the bill will make certain things such as public health and environmental regulation more difficult, but are clear-eyed about the fact that the bill doesn't force this outcome. Power still rests with Parliament and ministers. The second camp of critics has a slightly wilder flavour. The group would include popular lawyer Tania Waikato, who is associated with the Toitū Te Tiriti group, Dame Anne Salmond and Te Pāti Māori's social media accounts. Waikato said the bill would 'entrench… far right political views' into the fabric of the country via a 'regulatory constitution' and its passage would raise 'significant red flags about the introduction of fascism to this country'. While Salmond wrote in Newsroom that the law would 'tie the hands' of the state if it wished to regulate 'private activities or initiatives that create public harm' (like smoking), by 'requiring' those who benefit from laws or regulations to compensate others for the losses of profit that may arise from such regulation. Te Pāti Māori, meanwhile, took to Instagram claiming the bill would let judges 'strike down Māori-focused laws'. The anxiety arising from this criticism was pictorially represented by submitter Annie Collins. She drew a stick figure Minister for Regulation, Seymour, sitting atop the flow chart of state, vaguely resembling, in pixelated Zoom form, the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and held it aloft to the committee while voicing her fear the bill would lead to 'international corporations suing us'. The correctness of Waikato's critique is a matter of taste. The principles are certainly right of centre but it's a stretch to link the bill to anything fascist. Salmond's criticism is more straightforwardly incorrect. A principle of the bill is that those adversely affected by regulation be compensated, but as with everything else in the bill it doesn't force the Government to compensate anyone for anything. Some in the first basket of submitters noted the principles may burrow themselves into our laws through the courts. The Legislative Design and Advisory Committee also noted courts may 'read in' the principles when making decisions in the way the Bill of Rights has been 'read in' over the past three decades, but this bill specifically excludes allowing companies to sue the government. Te Pāti Māori's attack is flat out wrong – only one Parliamentary party has, this term, proposed allowing unelected officials to strike down laws and that is Te Pāti Māori itself, whose Tiriti commissioner (depending on which co-leader you talk to) could override the will of Parliament. For those of the Act persuasion, there's also a whiff of hypocrisy here – only a few years ago, during the pandemic, these sorts of attacks were swiftly labelled misinformation in the media and the wider public. There is a real sense on their side that public enforcement of the truth has a partisan bias. Act is taking things into its own hands, with unedifying attacks on Salmond and other critics as suffering from a 'derangement syndrome'. The challenge for Parliament is that the critiques of dubious factual merit are the ones that appear to be getting most pick-up. Pity Labour's MPs on the committee, opposing the bill for reasonable and justifiable grounds, but missing out on the attentional cut through garnered by the orgy of unfounded anxiety spread by its benchmates and their supporters. A story from veteran political journalist Richard Harman this week pondered the decline of Parliament's committees as a place of serious work, saying they'd become 'platforms for political protest'. One of the challenges faced by the committees is the sheer number of submissions. Nothing can be done about that – reducing people's right and ability to participate in democracy is a far greater evil than maintaining the genteel lie that all of these submissions are properly read and listened to. A bigger challenge is people using their oral submissions as a stage set for content creation rather than engaging with the bill in any substantive way (Waikato's 'fascism' submission falls into this category). This is a new problem. The streaming of committees only began during the first term of the Ardern Government and regular streaming of all public committees only began in the last Parliament. The streaming means submitters regularly clip up their appearances for use in political campaign videos. There's always been a performative element to select committees and campaign groups have, for decades, banged their particular drum in submissions that are only tangentially related to the bill in question. But the problem Parliament has now is the sheer number of submitters who submit in this way, vastly outweighing substantive submissions. What happens when voters' main engagement with the committee room is watching a social media video deliberately misinforming them about the nature of a law going through Parliament? What happens when the committees are all theatre and not, as the Conchords might say, Business Time?
