Renewables developer Lodestone Energy has started generating energy at its 39.4 MW solar project in Kaitaia, on New Zealand's North Island. The developer, which started work in late 2022 and broke ground in April 2023, expects the project to generate 55 GWh of power per year.
Besides the Kaitaia Solar Farm, Lodestone’s phase-one capital program includes solar projects at Edgecumbe, Waiotahe, Whitianga and Dargaville. While Kaitaia is the first of Lodestone’s solar farms to start generating, Edgecumbe is expected to be commissioned early in 2024 and Waiotahe late in the same year.
“This project ushers in a new era for energy in New Zealand. Kaitaia is the first solar farm at this scale and is a key step in helping New Zealand deliver on its climate goals,” said Gary Holden, managing director of Lodestone Energy. “It is also crucially important to our customers who have contracted with us to meet their own sustainable energy objectives.”
The Kaitaia installation is an agrivoltaic project, so agricultural activity can continue in and around the solar installations and even be enhanced by the solar facility. The project is surrounded by regeneration efforts with tree planting, among other elements.
With more than 61,000 solar panels installed at the North Island plant, the farm’s 55 GWh of power annually will flow to residential and commercial energy consumers, including all of the stores in New Zealand’s Warehouse Group, which is signed up to Lodestone’s phase 1 portfolio.
Lodestone Energy is New Zealand’s first utility-scale solar generation company and is wholly New Zealand-owned. About 80% of New Zealand’s electricity is from renewable sources, most of which is hydro generation, and less than 1% is generated by solar power. This looks set to change as the field of solar energy slowly ramps up in Aotearoa.
This week, The New Zealand Herald reported that a smaller solar farm has also started generating power. The Te Ihi o te Rā solar facility has just started generating power in Gisborne’s airport district on the mid-east coast of the north island. The solar farm produces enough power for 1,000 homes, with about 7,300 MW of electricity produced annually.
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I’m intriuged by how much power they think each homeuses per day.
If you have solar hot water, LED lighting, got rid of your teenagers and have 5☆ appliances and an induction hob, its easyto run on 5-6 kW a day. This means that these solar projects will power far more homes than is quoted for.
If not, we should be spending money on energy education and stopping waste.
For those advertising “houses powered” figures they use the average figures. The average is extremely accurate, MBIE collect data from retailers. Look up “Electricity cost and price monitoring MBIE”.
The average NZ household used 7023kwh last year, just over 19kwh a day. Fluctuates year to year depending on how cold the winter is, and has generally been decreasing for the last decade or so.
Power in NZ has been getting cheaper and making up a smaller and smaller portion of incomes since about 2015. That trend is likely to continue as new generation of renewables continues to get cheaper.
It doesn’t make financial or economic sense to go out of your way to invest money in using less electricity. When you get new appliances or are renovating anyway sure. But the austerity campaigns and artificial shortages of electricity doesn’t apply anymore with new market structures and incentives. People should use as much as they want to spend on it, any increase in consumption will be met with more generation investment from private operators.
Bob’s idealized consumption profile is enjoyed by the Gold card retiree’s but sadly that is not where the other 80% of next gen families land?
More like 4x more or 25kW pp per day.So correctly reduce energy ‘waste’ by incentivizing lowest consumption devices from Lodestone energy.
Nominally the wasted renewable energy is NOT coal fired so a backhanded🙊saving for CO2 mitigation HeapsMOREnergy -nz