This page is an archive containing links to a series of essays published in 2015. They briefly outline the evolution of the national electrical grid and illustrate how the original reticulation grids were privately owned and only served a few select urban areas.
Dissatisfied with the service, these towns purchased their local grid and transformed them into Municipal Electricity Departments (MEDs)
Most of the population still lived in rural areas and private companies had no interest in serving them. So rural communities established Electrical Power Boards and built their own reticulation grids.
These community-owned MEDs and Electrical Power Boards included the following features:
– all citizens had the human right to electrical heating, cooking, lighting and other modern electrical technology;
– the community owned their local system freehold (many citizens had witnessed the deprivations caused by war and “robber barons” and wished to ensure future generations would not have to endure these horrors again.);
– all citizens had the right to vote each three years how their local electrical grid would be informed, what electrical products would reticulated and how the information of the network was used.
– the MEDs and Electrical Power Boards worked together collaboratively to inform a national electrical grid that by the 1970s was one of the most advanced on the planet.
-Community systems tended to be service-driven with a fundamental imperative to minimize stress to the reticulation grids while maximizing the benefits to the community whereas the privatized grids are profit-driven with a fundamental imperative to maximize stress on the reticulation grids so as to maximize profits for their principal shareholders.
In 1984 the NZ Labour Party was installed as The Crown’s Government of Aotearoa with an agenda to facilitate the privatization New Zealand’s solar electrical potential and convert the freehold community-owned grid structures into debt-generating, money laundering, tax evasion devices. Subsequent Crown Governments have enacted and enforced this regime on scale. This is manifest as escalating household debt, poverty, inequity and disenfranchisement of most citizens plus unparalleled waste and pollution.
Note: the following essays were originally posted as first drafts and require revision . Much has happened in the subsequent decade and they also require significant updating because the privatization of the benefits of the confluence of new technology has been far more devastating than predicted.
Note: The images in some essays have vanished and require replacement as part of the general revision.
Civics – Embracing our Solar-Electric Potential
- 1890 – 1910s An Electrifying Transformation
- 1910-1950 National Community Networks
- 1950-1980 230v Telecom_Grids
- 1980s The Grand Tech Confluence
- 1990-2015 Grid Dumb-down
- Dangerous Connections
NON-CIVICS – Denying our Solar-Electrical Potential
Page under construction 8 June 2025