Flood-prone dairy farm power stations emerge as being global energy trade-offs

An official scheme to encourage the development of immense solar generating sites on dairy farms outside North Island tourist townships has emerged as the proposed Helensville site (pictured) became again submerged in the region’s most recent floods.

The power site, an immense one, complete with large scale batteries and complex current conversion towers might even have been on its way to completion had not a local action group constantly drawn attention to the risks involved in the low-lying pastoral site.

The Helensville Group Opposing Solar Farm Construction has been a long term lone voice pointing out the dangers of the generating site to planners and also even those involved with the site implementation itself.

Because of its devotion to official ideals the mainstream media remains mute on these obvious and dangerous flaws.

New Zealand is 82 percent powered by renewables and any energy shortage is contrived due to state interference in other sources.

An explanation of the state’s backing of solar energy farms in the neighbourhood of North Island tourist townships is the existence of an approved formula to implement offset schemes for industrial foreign energy consumers.

This means that the overseas energy consumers could offset anywhere in the world their power requirements derived from oil and gas by pointing out their contribution to renewables In New Zealand in the form of the solar plants.

Such solar plants in the tourist towns can be established cheaply simply because they can literally plug into the existing substations of the towns. The offsets inducement explains the reckless insistence in locating these electrical plants on these low-lying dairy farms.

Plans put forward for the other North Island tourist town, Greytown, illustrate this strategy.

Plans for Greytown mirror those for Helensville because of the use of neighbouring dairy land which is similarly on flood prone pastoral land.

Ironically the dairy sector and tourism are New Zealand’s major foreign revenue earners

It is known that the government has involved itself in identifying finance for these power schemes.

It is known too that the government has ensured that very senior personnel of ultra large scale power consumers have had removed impediments to residence here.

The Helensville site inundation which was forecast by the local action group also points to a willingness to suspend the otherwise rigorously-enforced regime of nationwide ultra-cautious health and safety measures whenever is involved any construction project of any size at all for anything at all.

The existence of an offsets trade off scheme for industrial solar plants goes a long way to explaining why New Zealand dairy farms adjacent to townships and thus the accessible electricity sub stations have suddenly become an international focus for solar developers.

This is when there are so many much drier, hotter and much sunnier locations in the southern hemisphere and which are remote from townships.

Supporters want to do good but now questioned how well they were doing themselves

Jacinda Ardern never understood that her guilt transfer policies that once thrilled the middle class now dismayed it.

The main reason that Miss Ardern missed the signals about her tarnishing moral robes was paradoxically her success in winning over the media to the justice of her causes from the outset of her premiership.

They tip toed around her – as did her own MPs.

The impression gathered momentum throughout the past year that Jacinda’s attentions were on more distant horizons instead of the mundane ones such as the price of groceries and the maintenance of law and order

An uncertainty began to settle over health and education.

Was the emphasis on what was being delivered? Or on which language it was being delivered in?

Jacinda Ardern pre-branded her first 12 months in office as the “Year of Deliveries.”

In her last 12 months in office there gathered within her well-to-do urban following questions centred on what was being delivered? Who was doing the ordering? And where were they based?

Were these deliveries three dimensional? Or were they internationalist notions designed to impede and generally trip up local unity and productivity?

It is symbolic that her resignation was close to the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because it was here that her cause of causes, globalisation, became unhinged.

Food “security” could no longer be taken for granted. So if New Zealand was responsible for feeding at least 40 million people beyond its own boundaries what exactly was it achieving in doing its utmost to encourage the putting out of business of farmers?

The surprise remains that there was any surprise.

Miss Ardern in announcing to a student gathering the curtailment of oil and gas exploration had laid out her agenda. Neither was it any coincidence that the students were the first to know. In so many ways Miss Ardern’s tenure was a continuation of student union activism.

Its timing was perfectly synchronised because of a huge swing away from technical and applied education and training in favour of the abstract tertiary social sciences.

The encouraged closure of the nation’s sole refinery at Marsden Point had repercussions still never understood such as that it meant the disappearance also of valuable by-products used from everything from road building materials to foodstuffs.

Miss Ardern’s early rhetorical triumphs blended with her wide-eyed over-promising still even last year created an impression that she was awaiting the opportunity to unleash the early magic.

This sense of anticipation grew more acute with the Occupation as groups disaffected by the sterner dictates of the Covid era converged on Parliament in the middle of Wellington.

The movement had actually begun in Canada, regrouped in Auckland. So there was plenty of time to prepare for it by, for example, removing all the parking places around Parliament itself.

There was a feeling that Miss Ardern would now mystically disperse the Occupiers with an “I feel your pain” type of speech.

In the event she was nowhere to be seen.

The Occupiers stayed, and stayed, and stayed until they were finally removed in a main force tough police action.

In the interval the Occupiers blocked off central city university halls so that students could not attend their lectures and public servants similarly could not get into their offices.

The urban progressive core constituency was shaken. How could this all have taken place and so close to where they lived?

The urban media now sprung to Miss Ardern’s defence by claiming that the Occupation, as it became known, was the work of the far right.

This conflicted with visual evidence that demonstrated that the disgruntled were a cross section of New Zealand society.

It was now that there began to start a series of attacks characterised by ram raids on small businesses in Auckland and these went on and on.

Once again the urban progressives began wondering where exactly was Miss Ardern?

Why was she not, for example, performing a workaday Member of Parliament stunt such as at least venturing out into the night in a police patrol car?

She seemed disinterested.

The urban educated professional class progressives want to do good and more importantly still want to be seen doing it.

They also want and expect to do well personally.

Davos Money Makeover hots up while South Island Rivers cool Banking Circuits

The World Economic Forum’s cryptocurrency priority as the centrepiece of its “internet of value” explains the intensity of the interest now by the global technology community in New Zealand providing the two essential components for this development.

One of these is mechanical. The other is ethical.

The mechanical component is the provision of the enhanced cooling required by the server farms hosting the accelerated technology.

The guiltless component is that the power driving the cooling systems is itself derived from renewable sources instead of fossil fuels.

The internet technology majors often infer that the server farms driving their networks have surpassed the mechanical world and operate neurally i.e. like the human brain – in waves.

Not so. They are still mechanical and need cooling.

The refrigerant has to be boosted for cryptocurrency because the process needs additional levels of circuitry density and usage just because the mathematical formula under process is so complex that the intensified binary activity generates the extra heat.

The south of New Zealand’s South Island is the ideal location for the cryptocurrency server farms because it is cool in those latitudes due to the region’s proximity to the Antarctic.

Another benefit is that the alpine refrigeration cannot be traced to oil, gas or coal. It is guilt-free.

A little-understood power usage effectiveness covenant requires the key players not only to sidestep fossil fuelled energy but to ensure also that a minimum proportion of operating costs is consumed by the approved renewable variety.

This is why there is so much activity now in calibrating server farm cooling energy sources in places like Clyde, Roxburgh, Makarewa, and Monowai and other places where snow and ice fed rivers run through them

Taxpayer commitment or “collaboration” in these schemes remains to be defined.

It is now 40 years since Gordon Hogg the founding chief executive of New Zealand’s Databank the world’s first trading bank information sharing cooperative saw the future in positioning the era’s air conditioned mainframe data centres where it was already cold.

He foresaw data centres installed in caverns in the Southern Alps (pictured.)

There the concept rested until the internet and social media sector in its virtuous search to distance itself from fossil fuels only quite recently revisited the economic and ethical blend in the rivers sourced in these same Southern Alps.

This in turn becomes a confluence with the evolving cryptocurrency movement advocated by the World Economic Forum of Davos fame as “revolutionizing the exchange of value – as the internet did for the exchange of information.” The WEF views it as the new “model for ownership.”

The WEF views cryptocurrency as the conduit for the “unbanked” to participate in the global economy. Something it claims that the existing global banking hegemony fails to enable

This fits neatly into the great re-set WEF makeover philosophy of which New Zealand’s Labour government is a stand-out cheerleader.

Alpine-grade cooling is required for cryptocurrency hosting because of the new currency’s customer technique known as data mining. This is the disintermediated user buy-in system, a do-it-yourself one, which needs very heavy duty binary crunching capacity.

The word mining is designed to conjure up gold rush images. It also indicates the heavy mathematical lifting in order for myriad formulae routines to squeeze through the binary bottleneck at ever greater speed to emerge as recognisable data and do so instantly.

Just as a motor vehicle under high revs requires more cooling so does a server farm at full load.

The World Economic Forum views the global banking hegemony as an impediment to the equitable global re-distribution of wealth.

The internet and social media technology leaders in their role as intermediary processors see this Davos-inspired levelling up as an opportunity to signal that they are on the same blameless path by putting distance between their operations and fossil energy sources.

Given the New Zealand government’s activist role in the WEF franchise the question arises if the alpine cooling for the server farms is economically as well as morally feasible.

The alpine cooling plan has the logic of using existing resources i.e. the alpine rivers in establishing a new industry without obliterating high value existing ones.

It compares with the drive to carpet over with solar hardware dairy farms situated on the outskirts of tourist townships.

It compares too with the foresting over of New Zealand’s prime farmland in order to allow foreign owners to make messes in their own countries.

Meanwhile in the Davos/WEF global context there will be interest by the technical community in the Clyde server scheme which blends electro-environmental and mechanical imperatives.

The scheme aligns in close proximity the temperature managed power source on the river, with the mechanical server farm itself. This means using Direct Current only and by-passing conversion into AC. This clean electricity is an extra environmental safety factor in containing radiation fallout.