The enormous solar farm which will be built next to SH5 Napier-Taupō Rd.
An enormous $750 million solar farm next to the main highway between Napier and Taupō is getting closer, with construction expected to begin in late 2025 or early 2026.
The Te Rahui solar farm project will be built on about 1000ha of farmland, directly across the highway from Rangitaiki Tavern, and feature about 700,000 solar panels.
It is expected to become a landmark for motorists travelling along Napier-Taupō Rd State Highway 5 (SH5), and will be among the largest solar farms in the country.
The farm is on the Hawke’s Bay-Bay of Plenty boundary.
While Hawke’s Bay currently has no commercial-scale solar farms, the region is about to turn a new chapter with a handful proposed or nearing construction.
Construction is hoped to start by the end of the year on another 35ha solar farm in Ongaonga, in Central Hawke’s Bay, led by lines company Centralines.
Two more solar farms are also proposed for Ongaonga, and another is proposed next to Hawke’s Bay Airport in Napier.
A resource consent application has yet to be lodged for the airport project.
The $750 million Te Rahui solar farm project is a joint project between Nova Energy (owned by Todd Corporation) and Meridian Energy.
The project received consent in late 2022 and an appeal in the Environment Court was dismissed in April last year, paving the way for the project to proceed at 3723 SH5.
It will be delivered across two stages, with the first expected to be built by 2027 and the second by 2030.
In a joint statement, the partnering companies said they were “in the final stages of financial close” for the project, 40km from Taupō.
“The solar project will deliver 200MW of renewable energy by 2027, with an additional 200MW to be built before the end of the decade.
“Nova and Meridian have formed a joint venture to build and operate the solar farm, sharing both the investment and the offtake.
“Civil works are under way, and construction is planned for late 2025/early 2026 based on current procurement timeframes.”
The land was a dairy farm. Sheep can potentially graze under the panels.
Meridian Energy was also behind the recently-completed Harapaki wind farm, off Napier-Taupō Rd SH5.
The first solar farm expected to be completed in Hawke’s Bay is Centralines’ 35ha project at 921 Ongaonga Rd.
It will take about a year to build and construction is expected to begin around December.
Centralines chairman Fenton Wilson said there were several factors that made building a solar farm attractive in Hawke’s Bay.
“We are right at the end of the lines.
“There is quite a bit of energy loss from generation delivery [such as from the South Island] to home and business [in Hawke’s Bay], which makes our energy quite expensive in this part of the world.
“So, having a generation source close to use, there is not so much energy loss.”
He said that makes the cost better and can benefit power users.
Northland, for example, is also far from power generation with relatively high power prices, and solar farms have been popular in that area.
Hawke’s Bay also has good sunlight hours relative to other North Island regions.
The cost of building solar farms - a renewable form of energy - has also become more competitive in recent years.
Jason Larkin, Centralines general manager customer, commercial and regulatory, said the cost of land was another factor which made a solar farm attractive for a given area.
He said Centralines’ project would also add resilience as “having generation locally can be important in a natural disaster or a transmission outage”.
The Centralines solar farm will connect straight into Centralines’ local network.
It is a community-level project, slightly different to larger-scale proposed projects for the region which connect into the national Transpower grid, Larkin said.
For larger energy companies, the cost of building large solar farms is generally considered cheaper to set up compared to alternatives - such as hydro, geothermal or wind turbines.
Gary Hamilton-Irvine is a Hawke’s Bay-based reporter who covers a range of news topics including business, councils, breaking news and cyclone recovery. He formerly worked at News Corp Australia.