Making aluminum uses a lot of electricity. The Rio Tinto smelter at Tiwai Point on the south island of New Zealand draws up to 572 megawatts of continuous power, most of which comes from a nearby hydroelectric power station. The smelter is New Zealand’s largest electricity consumer, accounting for about 13 percent of total annual electricity use in the country of 5.1 million people. A new.
But none of that comes close to the effect of shedding many megawatts of power. Under the contract, Meridian Energy and Contact Energy can call upon the smelter to reduce demand by between 25 MW and 185 MW. “The level of flexible demand offered by will support the electricity system to become even more renewable, while relying less on coal and gas when the hydro lakes are low,” Neal Barclay, Meridian Energy’s CEO, said in a May 31 statement.
So far, the company has been called upon “multiple times” to participate in the program, a spokesperson for Alcoa said recently, Participating involves halting production in its potlines — the rows of deep, rectangular steel shells in which alumina is made into molten aluminum. “We can, if required, take each of the smelter’s two potlines offline for about an hour at a time to reduce load on the network,” the spokesperson said.
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