Ex-Cyclone Tam live: Planes, ferries cancelled, thousands lose power as winds hit Auckland, Northland
Ex-Cyclone Tam live: Planes, ferries cancelled, thousands lose power as winds hit Auckland, Northland
www.rnz.co.nz
Ex-Cyclone Tam live: Extreme weather closes in on Coromandel, thousands without power in Northland
Severe weather is continuing to batter the top of the North Island as Cyclone Tam brings heavy rain and strong winds.
Towards Friday, the storm will begin to arrive in Coromandel, Bay of Plenty and the north of the South Island.
What you need to know:
- A large weather system is delivering heavy rain and strong winds to the upper North Island.
- Here's what you need to know as the bad weather hits.
- Around 25,000 properties had no power overnight in Northland and there are many outages in Auckland too.
- Cellphone towers have been damaged in Northland, landlines are still working. ONE NZ is working on opening up Satellite Text as an option for those with 4G.
- Air New Zealand has cancelled some flights, some ferry services in Auckland are either cancelled or suspended. See here for the ferry specifics.
- Up to 180mm of rain could strike Northland with possible thunderstorms, and strong wind warnings also in place.
- Auckland is experiencing high winds and rain.
- Rain is also forecast to spread into the South Island on Thursday.
- Warnings are in place for motorists using Auckland Harbour Bridge due to strong wind gusts.
I need to look into emergency electricity again; not going to get panels & battery for the house any time soon (or at least, not this year) but feels like being more prepared would be sensible just in case a similar Tam/Gabrielle hits Hawke's Bay again.
We got solar somewhat recently. You can often get cheap finance through your bank if you have a mortgage, $10k should be enough for a few panels. While a battery would be good for resilience, it's a significant cost that Consumer NZ reckons doesn't pay for itself and is only worth doing if you are looking for that protection from power cuts. It does seem like that's what you want, but you can add a battery later, and if you lose power for a long time then having power during the day is still better than none at all.
One thing that surprised me was how little power the house battery stores. As the nights get longer, we are often left without much power in the battery come morning. And if the heating is on we often don't make it through and it starts pulling from the grid.
The battery is about 13KWh and we have a Leaf EV that's maybe 25 or 30Kwh, so if you charge overnight then it just drains the whole battery.
Yeah I am tempted to wait a bit for battery technology to change to a point where the cost per Kwh for storage has become as attractive as the solar generation improvements did. I think the volume of battery will always be a factor but some of the new research into Sodium Ion look pretty interesting.