Solar panels like this were once planned for the farm but now the company is in liquidation. Photo / Supplied
Solar panels like this were once planned for the farm but now the company is in liquidation. Photo / Supplied
Insolvency has been declared to a business backing what it claimed last year would be one of New Zealand’s largest planned solar power farms.
Now, creditors want more than $12 million.
Lawyers Duncan Cotterill successfully applied to the High Court at Auckland last month to have liquidators appointed to Skysolar,whose only director is Auckland’s Cameron Alexander Blythe King.
Those lawyers were acting for creditor Solar Group which is one of many wanting money from the failed venture.
The first report from Colin Sanderson and Iain McLennan of Greenlane accountants McDonald Vague forecast an estimated deficit of $12.3m of which $10.2m is a claim over a property purchase.
In December, Hawke’s Bay Today reported how the Ongaonga solar farm could be one of NZ’s biggest and land would be retired from intensive dairy.
The company referred to then as Sky Solar had bought the farmland near the Kahahakuri Stream to build an eco-friendly solar farm, simultaneously retiring intensive irrigation and promoting biodiversity in the stream, that article of December 6 last year said.
According to the resource consent application, the proposed solar farm would have an operational capacity of 160 gigawatt hours annually at full capacity, enough to power 18,000 houses.
King, director of commercial projects and sales for Sky Solar, said at the time that the venture would likely be the biggest of its kind in the country when built.
The liquidators said the company traded for many years as a provider of small to medium size solar installations.
The Hawke’s Bay venture appears to have been its undoing.
“The company became involved with other entities in planning and the initial development steps of a large solar farm project in the Hawke’s Bay region. The company’s involvement included incurring/meeting the initial costs of the project in return for a 49.9 per cent share of the project, plus a 70 per cent share of certain amounts payable by other parties that were to be introduced to the project.
The proposed Ongaonga solar farm was to power 18,000 homes at full capacity. Graphic / Sky Solar
“The project advanced through the resource consent process and then delays in securing the next stage of project funding limited the company resources to advance and leaving a number of unpaid suppliers/creditors. The result of the supplier/creditors inputs are critical and remain valuable to the solar farm project,” the report said.
But King had indicated his intention to have all creditors paid and to apply to the High Court to have the liquidation terminated, the report said.
He also vowed to the Herald yesterday that financial issues would be sorted and no one would lose any money.
“All the documentation is on the table at the moment. This will all be sorted, it’s just a matter of working on some signatures and due diligence. We should get something signed off by tomorrow. No one will be left out of pocket,” King told the Herald yesterday.
In December, Central Hawke’s Bay District Council chief executive Doug Tate said the planned solar power farm supported the wider aspirations that the council held as part of its economic development action plan, including land use diversification.
Now, that very council appears as a creditor on the list of those with outstanding payments due.
All up, the liquidators forecast Skysolar has a $12,356,022 deficit made up primarily of the property claim of $10.2m.
But a further $2.1m is owed to others including the A M Renton Family Trust which wants $1.2m and Inland Revenue wanting $132,000.
Other creditors listed include King himself, lawyers Anthony Harper and Chapman Tripp, the Central Hawke’s Bay Council, BMW Financial Services NZ, Digital Island, Elite Electrical HB, Halcyon Project Management, Hoskins Energy Systems, Todd Solar, lawyers Tompkins Wake, the NZ Transport Authority, Chris & Co Electrical and accountants Bellingham Wallace.
A statement of affairs showed assets of $147,957 as work in progress for customers. An Isuzu D-Max ute, financed with BMW, is estimated to return about $29,000 once it’s sold.
The financial position today is a far cry from what King said in December when he envisaged lambs grazing underneath the solar panels to cut fire risk and ensure the land was used to its fullest.
He said then that the need for irrigation of the land would be almost eliminated. Only natural fertiliser would be used, and there would be a 10m buffer left along the stream with a native planting scheme.
“The idea is to improve the biodiversity of the Kahahakuri Stream,” King said five months ago.
“We are looking at funding some of the initial studies of that through Massey University to assess where it is at now and then engage through the coming years what effect the planting after the irrigation and intensive fertilising will have on the stream,” he said in December.
Skysolar got an initial Covid Government wage subsidy of $28,000 for four employees during the pandemic, then a further $18,700 as an extension, according to Work and Income.
