Dear Editor,

Use of gas to make electricity to create heat considered vandalism

How can a big company like Genesis Energy get away with proudly publicising their vandalism, while the ordinary graphitti artist gets 'rubbished' for a small defacement.

To use gas to create heat, to drive a dynamo, to make electricity which is then used to create heat: in water, oven or house; is destroying 40% of the heat value of the gas used *.

The responsible option would be to build a slightly better cleaning system (for the gas) than the Electric power plant will need, and pipe the gas to the area's homes and businesses. Much of the reticulation is already in place.

Using the natural gas to create heat, in water, oven or house, would lead to a decrease of about 60% in electricity use. Adequate protection against "outages". could then be achieved by using small local generators.

Anything rather than the wanton waste of 40% of an irreplaceable resource which, if it occurs, will be vandalism paid for by us both in the cost of its initiation and in the early exhaustion of the gas reserve.

* If the energy used in building the gas driven electric power generating plant is included, the overall waste of energy is of course, even greater.

-- John Henderson (Whangaparaoa)

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