Buoyed by promising feasibility results, NZ Windfarms has upped its shareholding in potential Otago wind farm developer Windpower Maungatua to 50%.
NZ Windfarms chief executive Chris Freear said yesterday that progress with the Maungatua project had encouraged the company to lift its stake from the 16.7% it bought last year.
"Things are shaping up to the point where we want to progress this, hence our decision to move to a higher level of involvement,'' he said.
The Maungatua project also knitted nicely with the company's Te Rere Hau wind farm nearing completion near Palmerston North, where work should be completed in the middle of next year.
Mr Freear said the company wanted a second project to move on to and, while there was plenty to do before work started at Maungatua, attention could move to the project once construction was complete on the Tararua Ranges farm.
He said the next stage of the $40 million Maungatua project would be getting resource consent for the wind farm, to be sighted on the Maungatua Ranges, in which 40 turbines would generate 20MW, about half the size of its Te Rere Hau farm.
The company was "comfortable'' with progress in the key aspects of the Maungatua site - suitable land, wind, resources, land and road access, and access to the electricity grid to move the electricity.
"Things are certainly shaping up, which makes us encouraged that we can make it into a fully-functioning wind farm".
It was too early to say when work would start because the wind farm still had to get resource consent.
But if it did go ahead, the 40 turbines would be 30m high to the hub or 46m high to the top of the blade's tip.
Te Rere Hau is a 50-50 joint venture between NZ Windfarms and National Power and Babcock and Brown Windpower, one of the world's largest developers and owners of wind farms.
There are now 10 wind farm proposals or developments around Otago and Southland, including Meridian Energy's $2 billion Project Hayes project on the Lammermoor Range, Trustpower's two-stage $400 million Lammerlaw Range project near Lake Mahinerangi and Meridian's $100 million 32-turbine White Hill project near Mossburn.
