New Zealand - East Otago eyed for wind farm

Meridian spokesman Alan Seay yesterday said the wide open expanses of the Lammermoor Range in East Otago, inland from Dunedin, was being looked at and tested as a wind power generation site. "This is a site that has quite a bit of potential. It could be quite a large site." Meridian was monitoring possible wind farm sites up and down the country and the East Otago site was one of these. However, monitoring results and analysis of wind patterns in the area would be months away, he said. "It's finishing monitoring and having a look at the data. You need to monitor for at least a year to have an idea of the full seasonal spread of patterns." The Lammermoor site with 225 turbines could produce about 650 megawatts (MW) of power. There was some urgency in New Zealand to identify new generation areas because of increasing energy consumption but Meridian was already heavily involved in wind projects, Mr Seay said.

Meridian is trying to get resource consent for a 210MW wind farm at Makara near Wellington and early next year plans to start building the 58MW White Hill wind farm, near Mossburn, in Southland. Mr Seay said the State-owned company had run into a couple of unforseen problems with the White Hill project. Connecting power from the turbines into the national grid was not as straight-forward as it first appeared but the hitch would not threaten the project, he said. It had also been difficult to get groundwork done on-site during the winter, he said. This year Meridian announced that construction of the $100 million White Hill wind farm would begin in July. The wind farm was scheduled to produce its first power in April or May next year and to be fully commissioned by year-end. Mr Seay said these deadlines could be pushed out by about a year because of the delays.