New Zealand Pledges an End to Coal by 2018

It appears that New Zealand is finally ready to throw their domestic coal habit into Mount Doom — by 2018, the country will cease to use coal as a source of domestic energy production.

“Historically coal has played an important role in ensuring the security of New Zealand’s electricity supply, particularly in dry years where our hydro-lake levels are low,” Simon Bridges, New Zealand’s Energy and Resources Minister, said in a statement.  “But significant market investment in other forms of renewable energy in recent years, particularly in geothermal, means that a coal backstop is becoming less of a requirement.”

Bridges’ statement comes on the heels of the country’s largest electricity and gas retailer, Genesis Energy, announcing its intentions to shut down the last of their two coal-fired boilers at the Huntly Power Station, located south of Auckland, by December of 2018.
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[C]oal use in New Zealand has been on the decline in recent years, accounting for just five percent of consumer energy demand in 2013 (oil made up the largest share, accounting for 46 percent of demand).  2013 also saw a six percent drop in coal production, largely due to Solid Energy — the country’s leading coal producer — scaling back its mining operations in two mines in the Waikato region of the country.  Increasingly, coal in that region is becoming more difficult to locate and more expensive to mine, limiting the nation’s ability to rely on the resource for its energy supply.

Instead, New Zealand has turned to renewable energy in recent years, particularly geothermal energy, which has more than doubled in the past decade.  In 2014, for the first time in the country’s history, geothermal generation provided more electricity than gas — 16.3 percent of New Zealand’s total electricity versus 15.8 percent.

According to a statement by Bridges in March of this year, electricity generated from renewables is at a 20-year high in New Zealand, accounting for 79.9 percent of all electricity generated.  Bridges told the New Zealand Herald that “New Zealand’s share of renewable electricity generation is the fourth largest in the world,” and that the country aims to have 90 percent of its electricity produced by renewable resources in 2025.

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