Meridian Energy's wind farm at Makara, viewed from Karori, has angered some locals. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Meridian Energy's wind farm at Makara, viewed from Karori, has angered some locals. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Wind power - the great green hope to ease fragile electricity supply - is being buffetted from all sides.

Wind farm neighbours, courts and economics are hammering away at plans to expand the industry which now provides around 3 per cent of our power but is forecast to grow to 20 per cent within the next 15 years.

Wind's main proponent, state-owned Meridian Energy, is likely within the next few days to announce it will fight an Environment Court ruling which killed off one of the biggest wind farms in the world, the $2 billion Project Hayes in Central Otago.

This will reignite a fight with opponents including former All Blacks, an artist and a poet and challenge the court which agreed that economic justification did not outweigh environmental impacts.

Any appeal over the Hayes decision would be to the High Court on points of law but driving it is Meridian's contention that any large infrastructure project would now struggle to get over the bar set by the Environment Court.

Near Wellington, neighbours of Meridian's Project West Wind complain of sleepless nights and feeling "seasick".

Energy companies have for the past two years done a lot of prospecting for wind sites but have mainly been holding back on going ahead with projects because the figures don't stack up.

New Zealand, with its prevailing westerly winds in the Roaring Forties, has some of the best wind resource in the world. It is free and in a carbon constrained market, a fuel of the future.

So why has wind farming fallen out of favour? Besides the economic challenge it mainly comes down to who lives nearby.

Like most power, we like using it but don't like seeing it being made.

Project backers have long had to deal with claims that birds and bats fall victim to the massive blades but one of the more bizarre claims this year came from Taiwan where a farmer claimed hundreds of his goats had died through sleep deprivation because of noise from a nearby wind farm. Reports could not be found to substantiate the claim.

In this country there's been a messy scrap between pioneer turbine maker Windflow Technology and its only customer, NZ Windfarms, which had withheld payments while seeking greater technical reassurance. There is a thaw in the impasse but it did give encouragement to wind power sceptics' view the industry is still towards the fringe.

Contact Energy hasn't helped the cause either, stalling its own 540MW Waikato project by calling for a year's delay in a hearing it had previously described as urgent. Opposition from well organised and in some cases wealthy neighbours, and failure to get all its ducks in a row led to the backtrack by Contact, which conceded it was a victim of its own overconfidence.