Plug Pulled on Project Aqua

A quick comment on the demise of Project Aqua which occurred during Aotearoa Indymedia's lengthy outage while it migration to its new server.

Meridian Energy have withdrawn their Resource consent application to turn a stretch of the beautiful Waitaki river into an artifical lake for the generation of electricity. Although they cited overwhelming compliance costs as their reason for dropping the application, activists believe the
prospect of facing down a high-profile grassroots campaign against the project for the power giant.

While pro-business commentators have called for a major overhaul of the Resource Management Act (RMA) to make it more development-friendly, for environmentalists this is a major victory over the 'Think Big' mentality that the RMA was created to get under control.

While the same commentators bemoan the loss of potential jobs and alleged damage to the economy, the recent Eco-Show in Auckland demonstrated that it is both possible to move towards renewable energy systems that generate at a local scale. This has the potential to put communities back in
control of providing for their energy needs, reversing the effects of the last National Government's electricity reforms which overwhelmingly handed control over electricity
generation and distribution to a quickly narrowing elite of corporate players.