Solar farm still alive after liquidation
Progress is being made behind the scenes on a huge solar farm project in Central Hawke’s Bay, a year after its developer went into liquidation.
Those involved in the process say the outlook is still good.
At the end of 2022 it was announced that the solar farm, with a full operational capacity of 160 gigawatt hours per year, enough to power 18,000 houses, was to be built on 152ha of farmland near Ongaonga.
The future of the project became unclear as SkySolar would be put into liquidation only months later, owing creditors $12.3 million.
Cameron King, director of commercial projects and sales for developer SkySolar, said at the time the project would still go ahead despite the liquidation.
Iain McLennan, a licensed insolvency practitioner from McDonald Vague Insolvency handling SkySolar’s case, said earlier he did not believe the project would die.
Since then, a second report into the insolvency of SkySolar, published by McDonald Vague Insolvency in October, suggested a proposal received from the director of SkySolar would see all creditors paid in full by late 2023 or early 2024 if completed.
McLennan said the Ongaonga solar farm was “moving forward positively” and “the outlook is good”.
He confirmed there were discussions with Transpower, but he was unable to give further details as they were dealing with “confidential
matters”.
King said the future of the project was “looking promising”.
No work has been done on-site yet, despite construction originally being expected to start last winter.
King said he could not confirm when shovels would hit the ground.
A Transpower spokeswoman said there were three entries for generation developments at Waipawa.
“All three of those projects have the status of investigation, which means we have a connection investigation resourced and under way. Typically the investigation stage for a generation connection takes between six and 12 months, depending on the complexity of the project,” the spokeswoman said. “This may be followed by an investment contract and a delivery stage taking between 12 and 30 months, again depending on the complexity of the project.”