HYDRO-ELECTRICITY.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 September 1922, Page 5

HYDRO-ELECTRICITY.

A PESSIMISTIC VIEW. Dr. Newman, M.P. for Wellington East, is far from being enthusaistic about hydroelectricity in this country. He is afraid it is going to cost too much. On Friday he told the House of Representatives that the generation of electricity from water power was all very well in Norway and Canada, where it could be done cheaply. He could hardly see how any of the New Zealand schemes were going to pay. Yeats ago, he said, the H&use had been assured that the Lake Coleridge works would pay. He had expressed at the time his belief that it would perhaps mean cheap power for Canterbury— at the expense of the whole body of taxpayers in New Zealand; and it seemed to him that his forecast had been justified. Lake Coleridge had cost a great deal of money, and it had never paid interest and sinking fund and depreciation. So far as the North Island works were conconcerned, he doubted whether farmers who had installed oil engines to drive their machinery would scrap those engines in order to use electricity.