The directors of the newly registered Pumped Hydro Holdings Ltd were in Central Otago yesterday talking to landowners with a hope to progress the multibillion-dollar project through the government’s fast-track process.
The four directors of the company are former Transpower chairman and Meridian Energy chief executive Keith Turner, former minister for the environment and longtime Labour MP David Parker, Christchurch lawyer and mediator John Hardie and former Meridian Energy executive Ken Smales.
Dr Turner declined to go into specifics about discussions with the landowners but said plans were moving forward.
"We have sufficient support from landowners to be prepared now to lodge an application for fast track, and that’s the next step for us," he said.
"It’ll be within the next week or two. We’re well down the track on drafting that application, and, yeah, we’re very keen to get it on the table and get it considered."
"I think everyone knows that thermal plant at Huntly is not going to go on forever and at the moment it looks like it may be able to continue to 2035 but if it breaks down then the country’s got deep trouble with dry sequences."
Something had to replace it and the country was living on borrowed time in regards to a 1.2 million-tonne coal stockpile.
"Onslow makes an awful lot of sense when Huntly is no longer available."
The battery idea was first dreamt up by Waikato University Associate Prof Earl Bardsley in 2002 and has been passed around ever since.
It revolved around a pumped hydro scheme at Lake Onslow, above Millers Flat. The lake would be significantly enlarged and water would be pumped uphill from the Clutha River when power prices were low and the river was running high.
The water would be stored in the form of a battery and used in times of power shortages, being put back into power station and then Lake Roxburgh.
The previous government set up the NZ Battery Project in 2020 to look at the feasibility of the scheme and spent $30 million on analysis.
But when the National-led government took over in 2023, it dumped the project almost immediately, saying it had consenting issues and would take at least a decade to build. Dr Turner said National did not want public money involved, so the new scheme would not run into this problem. It was still early days for the project.
"What I do know is that — and I sit on a big board in Australia that’s doing quite big projects — there’s a huge amount of interest in large renewable energy projects globally. I’m sure this project will be sufficiently interesting to large sovereign wealth funds and capital investors to attract the capital if we get into the fast-track process."
He said the project had been costed at $16 billion but the cost they had was $8.5b, but there was still a lot of engineering work to be done.
Dr Turner said the country really needed this project.
Having a reliable source would allow wind and solar farm proposals to go ahead. Gas supplies were running out.
"Something has to be done to keep supporting the cheaper forms of energy and keep New Zealand prices down."
He said the suggestion building a large battery project would lead to no investment in new power plants was simply not true.
If it goes ahead the project will have 5000GWh of energy storage capacity — larger than the current energy storage capacity of all New Zealand hydro lakes put together.
Mr Bardsley said yesterday the hydro experience of key people such as Dr Turner was a real advantage.
The previous government’s investigation was structured so the Onslow proposal had to show it was at least as good as other possible dry-year solutions, he said.
"That caused paralysis by analysis via multiple reports and progress was painfully slow. The consortium has already picked Onslow as the winner and can get on with the task with full focus."
The new backers had the advantage of having the information gathered by the previous study.
