The Herald had another announcement today about a new solar farm being officially opened - this time the 63MW Lauriston solar farm in Canterbury. It is of course briefly "NZ’s biggest solar farm", but it will soon be overtaken by Kōwhai park at Christchurch airport (168MW) and Tauhei (202MW), both of which are currently under construction and should be complete next year. And looking further ahead, the 400MW Te Rāhui farm near Tāupo should be building soon, along with a number of other big projects.
None of this has any form of government assistance. Instead, the government is still blathering about gas as a "transition fuel". Which is the thinking of twenty years ago. The last major gas-fired power station in Aotearoa was commissioned in 2007. While there have been a couple of "peaker" plants added since, they're much smaller and not intended for baseload generation. And there are no plans for any in the future: the last "live" gas project - Todd Energy's proposed peaker plant at Ōtorohanga - was cancelled years ago (though the consents for it have not yet expired). The market has spoken: the future is solar, and wind, and batteries. The gas industry is dead; it just hasn't realised it yet.
