Posts by Paul Campbell
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Sacha was saying that resources are limited - in essence we get fibre everywhere or motorways - I was bemoaning getting neither and since I work at home I actually care about the fibre much much more - but as far as Dunedin is concerned 30 years to get a motorway? really? we were promised one when they took away the commuter trains
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yes exactly - but in this case they were probably negotiating with guys from the same golf club
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Lilith: I agree - I was just pointing out that the as the crows fly route happened to match the monorail one. In reality you'd put it around the mountains rather than over them - more likely down the Kawarau than over the Crown Range I think.
But instead the easy thing is to power Invercargil and Dunedin from Manapouri rather than Roxburgh/Clyde, feed the rest of the power the other way back towards Roxburgh (reverse those lines) and tie that power over to Benmore and to the North Island
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wish we could get fibre - looks like I'll have to wait another 3-4 years at this point (and I live in an upper middle class neighbourhood near the centre of town) - and I have a cluster of work at home neighbours who telecommute to the US and Europe - some fool government is paying to give the fibre rights to the same company that provides the copper infrastructure and there's no competition, no incentive for them to hurry up and install.
I can't go down and knock on the door at Chorus's local office to talk to them about it - they closed their Dunedin office, laid off all their staff, I can't call them on the phone, they have a single 800 number staffed by someone who's job is to not let calls like mine get through, they tell me to email their info email address, staffed apparently by someone who's job is to do the same with emails.
But you know they can afford to rent all those billboards in Times Square
At this point we may well be laying our own, or the kids will be done with Uni in 18 months might be time to move back to US for a few years, the great thing about my job is that I can do it from anywhere
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actually the Monorail route would go from St Nicholas station (other side of the lake from Queenstown, reached by boat, to Mavora lakes by bus, then from there to Te Anau Downs by monorail - I think it's the people who want to build the tunnel who want to go from Glenorchy to the Milford Highway.
Running a power line along just about the same route as the proposed monorail and over Wakatipu would be just about the straightest route from Manapouri to join up with the Clyde power going north - but using existing lines (and a tie from Roxburgh to Benmore might involve stringing a lot less new cable even if the power loss was a little greater)
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We do too have traffic jams, every day from 5 until 5:15 - the issue though is not traffic jams, it's the difference between driving <50k on city streets including traffic lights, driveways, and an uncontrolled intersection at the top of the hill with cross traffic vs. 2 lanes in each direction going at 100k on a motorway
BTW we also resent that the highway in from the airport in Auckland is named after Hugh Watt, apparently a local hero - not a hero to many in the south, more of a bogeyman as he was responsible for the process that resulted in the damming of the Waitaki and Manapouri, he also promised "no dams below Roxburgh" and Meridian has been trying to go back on that promise for years now
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Sacha: I think there's a lot of resentment outside of Auckland about all the money being spent there to mitigate simple geography you can't really do much about - you already have motorways up the wazoo - Dunedin's been waiting 30 years now for them to simply finish building the 2 lane divided highway south out of town (to our fastest growing dormitory suburb) I'm told there are bulldozers in Caversham, we may yet see it in my life time, no sign of even plans for the single required overbridge yet though
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Sacha,
genuine high voltage adventure tourism #sorted
2 birds with one stone - the competing scheme with the gondolas strung from the 20kV wires - genuinely hair-raising adventure tourism!
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to be fair I'm quoting Dunedin's own publicity .....
note that the dual lines from Manapouri going south are not dual to carry the Tiwai load but to provide redundancy (because the pot lines would be ruined if ever the power went off) looking at the map there's likely already enough capacity to run Invercargill/Dunedin/etc off of it and a tie-line from Roxbourgh up the back of St Bathans to Benmore wouldn't be much of a stretch
(edit: probably exactly what Lucy mentions above)
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Matthew Poole,
One thing about redirecting electricity from Manapouri is that it doesn't have to be redirected all the way north. The station is already some distance from Tiwai Pt, so changing the feed direction to north instead of south would allow power from stations further north to be sent north, and so on. It'd be a very significant oversupply to the bottom of the south, to be sure, but by shifting the various stations' supplies to a northwards direction it would make it easier to minimise transmission losses.
Harder than you think - here's a map ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_Zealand_transmission_grid.svgthat line you'd like to put in would go through Fiordland Nat Park - roughly where they are arguing about monorails and the like at the moment
Any extra power to the North Island would have to go through Benmore I guess