Machinion Post

Two hundred schools, the first tranche of a planned five hundred, are to have solar panels fitted under the thirty million dollar Solar in Schools programme announced in this year's Budget. Forty are in the North Island, one hundred and fifty seven in the South Island, and three in the Chathams. The pilot is now under way.

What is at stake is not the thirty million dollars itself, which is no small sum but modest against the scale of the country's power needs. It is whether a programme of this kind does the work the Minister of Energy, Simon Watts, most needs done: securing capacity for the evenings and the dry winters when hydro lakes run low and demand runs high. Solar panels on school roofs will lower power bills for boards of trustees and give a generation of pupils a plain lesson in where electricity comes from. Both are worth having. Neither answers the harder question.

The case for the scheme, fairly put, is that distributed generation of any size helps at the margin, that schools are well suited to it because their roofs are large and their daytime use is steady, and that a pilot spread across both islands allows the Government to learn before it commits further money. That is a reasonable defence of a modest programme, and this newspaper does not begrudge it. But solar generates when the sun shines, which in a South Island winter is precisely when it is least needed and least available, and the dry-year problem this country faces is a problem of the evening peak and the low lake, not of the school day in December. A programme weighted so heavily toward the South Island, one hundred and fifty seven schools against forty in the North, invites the question of what analysis, if any, set that balance, and the Minister owes the House an answer.

None of this is an argument against solar panels on school roofs. It is an argument against mistaking a worthwhile amenity for an energy security policy, and the risk is not that the Minister believes this himself but that the announcement will be read, by a public anxious after recent winters, as more of an answer than it is. The gas transition still wants firming capacity that only gas, geothermal and storage can supply at the pace required, and no quantity of rooftop panels changes that arithmetic. The verdict of this newspaper is that the schools programme should proceed, and be judged a modest success if it lowers bills as promised, but that the Minister must say plainly, and soon, what is being done in parallel to secure the dry-year capacity that solar cannot provide.