Māori urged to help power Aotearoa's energy shift

A conference in New Plymouth has heard it's a crucial time for Māori to invest in the rapidly changing electricity industry.

The second annual Aotearoa Energy Summit brought iwi and hapū as well as energy companies to New Plymouth this week.

Contact Energy chief executive Mike Fuge said the next 18 months were critical in the transition from fossil fuels to electrification – and Māori investors needed to move quickly.

"If we have not walked that journey in eighteen months with iwi, we've failed," Fuge said.

"This is the moment where kind words about partnership either stay as kind words in a conversation or kōrero or on a page – or become a reality."

Fuge said it was time to start building power stations and data centres, and to scale-up electrification.

Contact has proposed a $5 billion dollar data centre in Stratford with trans-Tasman developer CDC.

"Our tamariki and mokopuna will be really pissed off with us if we let it go by," Fuge said.

"They have this wonderful opportunity: the skills for high-quality, high-income jobs which are not on the baseline of the minimum wage."

Transpower chief executive James Kilty said he wanted to wake people up to the urgent need to electrify, and the workforce required.

"Get your kids into engineering school.

"We don't need more lawyers, we need doers – we need people who can get the jobs done."

Kilty backed Fuge's call for Māori investors to move fast and build relationships.

"This is a serious energy transition we're in.

"We don't need people saying no – we need people to trust and to be trustworthy."

The summit was called by Taranaki's collective iwi body Te Tōpuni Ngārahu and the Iwi Chairs Forum.

The Forum's pou tahua Jamie Tuuta – also a Taranaki tribal leader – agreed the next 18 months would shape the following 30 years.

"The question is whether iwi, hapū, and Māori economic entities are building what comes next or watching others build it across the fence," Tuuta said.

He said Taranaki had seen oil and gas build skills and livelihoods, but billions of dollars were siphoned from the region.

"We were spectators. We were disregarded. We're at the other end of the equation with renewables."

"This time, we come as rights holders, not stakeholders, as kaitiaki, landowners, and investors."

Tuuta said partnerships with iwi offered a fast-lane: certainty on land, access, and consents.

He hoped at the next summit to report a successful partnership with Contact but warned that iwi and hapū need to consider all aspects of investments.

"What the value is to our taiao (environment) and to our people?

"That's what I want to achieve within the next twelve months."

Environmental consultant Tina Porou emphasised that caution.

In 1964 Porou's hapū Ngāti Tūrangitukua had all their land taken under the Tūrangi Township Act for the Tongariro power scheme and the building of Tūrangi township.

"We lost our waterways, we lost our houses, we lost our homes.

"They literally bulldozed our houses when our pakeke (elders) were in them."

A former head of sustainability at Contact, Porou said considering environmental and social impacts was a bare minimum compared to "taiao-centred governance".

"Unless you define what that is against your whakapapa, and then meet it every time, you are gonna be like everybody else.

"Do not drink your own Kool-Aid."

Porou said she wasn't advising against energy investments, but to focus on what was important.

"If your outcome is to have benefits for your whānau so that you get cheaper power, then structure the deal round that.

"If your outcome is to ensure … environmental effects [aren't put] on the community in which you live, then focus on that."