Mighty River's geothermal push

DAVID HALLETT/The Press

CLEANER POWER: Electricity generation from coal has fallen sharply in the September quarter, down 900 gigawatt hours, or 65.8 per cent, on the same period last year according to Statistics New Zealand.

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Mighty River Power will spend $450 million building a geothermal power station at Rotokawa, 10 kilometres north of Taupo.

The state-owned electricity generator and retailer told Parliament's commerce select committee yesterday that the station would generate 132 megawatts of electricity, enough for a city the size of Tauranga.

Company chairwoman Carole Durbin said Nga Awa Purua would be the second biggest geothermal power station in New Zealand.

Mighty River was granted resource consent for the station in December, and procurement contracts are due to be completed this month. The station will be built near the existing, much smaller, 37MW plant and will connect to the 220-kilovolt transmission lines that run directly over the field.

Nga Awa Purua is a joint venture with the Tauhara North No2 Trust, and will take about 2½ years to build.

Mighty River chief executive Doug Heffernan said Nga Awa Purua was first talked about 20 years ago. "It didn't happen at that time because the country had so much cheap Maui gas and it was too expensive to develop the field."

Mighty River will also commission its $300 million 90MW geothermal station at Kawerau this year.

Mr Heffernan said geothermal generation would make up nearly half of all generation by 2015, compared with about 5 per cent two years ago. Hydro generation would make up the other half, down from about 80 per cent two years ago.

Mr Heffernan told the committee that rain at the weekend had filled the hydro lakes enough to provide an extra month of storage, easing the pressure on winter power supply.

Yesterday Environment Minister Trevor Mallard appointed Judge Gordon Whiting to chair a board of inquiry to consider Contact Energy's proposal for a 220MW geothermal power station at Te Mihi near Taupo.

The board will consider submissions on Contact's resource consent application for the $500 million plant, hold a public meeting and make a final decision on the proposal.

The company plans to have the geothermal plant producing electricity by 2011. Contact will lobby for the same fast-track process for a second geothermal plant in the Tauhara steamfield.

The two would cost Contact about $1 billion to develop in the next five years.

- © Fairfax NZ News