State-owned Mighty River Power is to buy a 19.95 per cent shareholding in local wind power turbine company Windflow Technology.
The placement was subject to shareholder approval and expected to raise more than $7 million, based on expected shareholder capital after an options exercise in September, Windflow saidtoday.
Mighty River said the two companies had also entered conditional arrangements under which Windflow would, subject to consents, build a proposed wind farm at Long Gully outside Wellington on Mighty River's behalf.
Mighty River was seeking to add wind to its renewable electricity generation portfolio, with the aim of developing up to 500 megawatts of wind power by 2015, Mighty River acting chief executive William Meek said.
His company had identified a number of potential wind generation sites throughout the country and was in various stages of investigation, monitoring and consultation at the sites.
Windflow chief executive Geoff Henderson said the additional equity capital investment would enable Windflow to accelerate its development of new variants of the Windflow 500 wind turbine and entry into new market sectors.
Windflow shares were up 28c, or 9.3 per cent, to $3.28 by late morning today.
