Looking at sites for wind farms

Former Waitaki mayor Alan McLay and former power company chief executive Keith Turner have set up a company to investigate the potential of new wind farms.

They are the sole shareholders and directors of Waitaki Wind, registered to look at areas in the central South Island for wind farms.

Dr Turner was former chief executive of Meridian Energy when it instigated the Project Hayes wind farm and the north bank tunnel concept hydro-power scheme on the Waitaki River.

Mr McLay was Waitaki mayor for two terms until 2007 and is chairman of the North Otago Irrigation Company, in which Meridian has a shareholding.

Yesterday, when contacted in Wellington, Dr Turner was "exceedingly cautious" about the new company, describing it as "just an idea that has not gone particularly far yet".

At this stage, they were the sole shareholders, but Waitaki Wind could become a completely different company if sites were found that were of significant interest, he said.

"The first step is to put a little bit of money together to investigate whether there is some reasonable wind opportunities."

Dr Turner would not say where those opportunities could be.

Because it was "so early", he could give no detail.

"The public is pretty widely aware of Project Hayes and those wind patterns are fairly consistent across the Maniototo Plains and reaching into the North Otago area.

You have a well-defined pattern and wind source, so you would expect there must be other areas that have a reasonable wind regime," he said.

Where, how good they were, how easy they were to develop, whether they were commercial and did they make sense to seek resource consents still had to be determined.

While the company was named Waitaki Wind, investigations were not limited to that area.

There was nothing significant in the name as to where possible sites could be.

"We want to be very broad in geographic location," he said.

Dr Turner said that now the company had been established, research would be done on where good wind areas could be, followed up by some survey work including possibly aerial and visual surveys.

Areas "that became interesting" were likely to lead to discussions with landowners.

If those discussions were positive, the next step would be to put up wind-monitoring equipment.

"Until you have wind-monitoring equipment and data, correlated with existing data, you don't know what you have got," he said.

Dr Turner, who has a life-long involvement in the electricity industry, retired as chief executive of Meridian last year.

He has another interest in the Waitaki Valley as chairman of Oceania Milk, which is proposing to build a $100 million milk-processing plant at Glenavy.

That company is at present preparing resource consent applications for the project.