From the Provinces comes the Wealth

Victor Luca, 26 August 2026

We have all heard the Minister for Regional Development and Resources, Shane Jones, state that the country’s wealth comes from the provinces and on that I agree with him. Just look at what is exported through Port of Tauranga, New Zealand’s major export port. The port itself is a business worth about $3.5B whose majority owner (54.14%) is the BOP Regional Council through its investment arm Quayside Holdings Ltd. Quayside is owned by the Regional Council, and its holding in the port may change some time in the future.

The figure shows the percentage of export value of five groups of commodities that passes through the port and demonstrates that while the port may be located in Tauranga, most of what is exported comes from the provinces. Dairy alone accounts for 41% of export value. Interestingly, all those low added-value logs you see on trucks driving around the place represent a meager 3.8% of exported value.

The port of Tauranga has been a valuable business. Since 2000, publicly traded shares in the Port of Tauranga (POT NZX) have increased from $0.69/share to the current value of $8.10/share. Has anyone’s investment in their house gone up (in dollar terms) more than 10-fold in that time? I doubt it.

But there is another thing that the provinces like the Eastern Bay of Plenty (EBOP) produce an abundance of and that is often overlooked, and that is energy. EBOP produces about 11% of NZ’s electrical energy and yet accounts for only 1% of the of the country’s population. We generate about 500 MW of power in the EBOP, and of that, over half is now coming from Solar, and sunlight comes to us from the Sun for free. Sunlight is one of our most plentiful resources and in my opinion is still significantly underutilized in New Zealand. In the EBOP we also have plenty of underutilization of geothermal energy. Solar energy however, is by far the cheapest form of energy generation thanks to the Chinese who produce over 80% of the world’s solar panels and batteries and have been responsible for a massive drop in the price of both over the past few decades.

Without energy, and especially cheap energy, no one produces anything competitively, and our households would grind to a halt. We have all seen how wood-processing industries have had to close in recent years because, in part, due to high energy costs rendering them unviable.

In fact Gross World Product (GWP) and Energy Consumption are strongly correlated. GWP is the equivalent of GDP but on a world scale. Bottom line is, that if you want to be a prosperous country, then you should generate and consume lots of energy. Energy makes the world go around. Without energy modern society and modern industrial farming would be impossible.

Source: Professor Steve Keen, Putting Energy Back into Economics.

We in the EBOP are sitting on a mountain of energy and are not really doing enough with it. By that I mean coupling the energy with h

igh value-added industries.

If folk haven’t realized the importance of energy yet with all that is going on in the Middle East, then my guess is that we about to as the oil shock bites. And by the way, we should already have done a better job than we have of transitioning away from fossil fuels to electricity.

Importantly, solar is not only the cheapest and cleanest form of energy but solar power plants are the quickest to build. Nuclear power plants produce mammoth amounts of emissions-free energy but they are extremely costly and take a long time to build (5-10 years), even after regulatory approval. In contrast, if you got serious, you could build a solar plant in a year or two.

However, solar comes with a problem and it is the so-called ‘Duck Curve’. Solar energy production is maximized during the middle of the day when consumption is lowest and minimized when the sun don’t shine. That is why solar without batteries is so sub-optimal. I could say that (at least for grid-scale applications), without batteries, you can stick the solar where the Sun don’t shine. LOL

Not only has the cost of solar panels dropped significantly over the decades, so too has the cost of grid-scale battery energy storage (BES), using Li-ion and related batteries. When I first started carrying out research on Li-ion battery chemistry around 1998, those batteries were prohibitively expensive and were used only for portable electronics. Over the past decade alone, the cost of BES has dropped by a factor of about four. And again thanks to China, which controls 80% of the BES market, the technology continues to improve and the costs continue to fall.

The EBOP is therefore a winner, not just in high-value agricultural production, but it is also a champion in energy production (solar, geothermal & hydro). And yet when it comes to getting our fair-share of the pie from Government, we often get the short-end of the stick. EBOP should be rewarded for the production of energy and commodities not punished. It is time for us to stick up for ourselves and not let the Tauranga crowd get up themselves.

Additional Material

The Eastern Bay of Plenty (EBOP) makes up 65% of the land area of the BOP.

EBOP + Rotorua lakes makes up 88% of the land area of the BOP.