Sizeable solar farm floats onwastewater lake
The country’s biggest solar farm, which floats on treated wastewater, was officially commissioned yesterday.
More than 2700 panels, covering nearly 1 hectare, have been installed on pontoons floating on the treatment lake at Rosedale on Auckland’s North Shore.
Watercare, an Auckland Councilcontrolled organisation, said the 1-megawatt plant might be just the first of other floating arrays at its facilities.
The plant could power the equivalent of 200 homes. Instead it will generate energy to run the sewage treatment plant where it was installed, saving about $150,000 a year in electricity costs.
‘‘Because of increasing energy costs, it’s increasingly viable to do this,’’ Laurence Jenner, Watercare’s green energy specialist, said.
The installation was built by Vector Powersmart, which approached Watercare two years ago with the idea of a floating solar array.
‘‘They are increasingly common overseas, and once assembled it is extremely stable,’’ Jenner said.
The solar power will be used alongside a biogas generator, which is fuelled by wastewater before it’s treated that is being held in the lake prior to discharge.
Vector Powersmart said there were challenges: building the array in four sections; connecting them; and locating them with 60 2.5-tonne concrete anchors.
The company said solar farms were growing rapidly in size.
‘‘A decade ago we did a residential system of 1.4 kilowatts – Watercare’s is that times 1000 – and one at Napier’s Airport where we are the technical lead is 10MW, tenfold that again,’’ chief executive Rogier Simons said.
The Rosedale solar array will reduce the carbon footprint of the treatment plant by 145 tonnes of carbon a year.
It would pay for itself well within its life expectancy of 25 to 30 years, Jenner said.
Rosedale will hold the honour of being the country’s biggest solar array only until a 1.6MW rooftop array is completed for supermarket wholesaler Foodstuffs, near Auckland Airport.
Both pale in comparison with the 10MW solar farm proposed for unused land at Hawke’s Bay Airport, which will produce enough electricity to run 2000 households.
NZ First released its election manifesto online on Thursday, without fanfare or announcement. The manifesto says business tax cuts and deregulation would be needed to help New Zealand out of the Covid-19 crisis. The party’s immigration policy focuses on a tight quota of skilled visa workers entering the country, a 1000-visa cap on the parent resident visa, and a rural visa schemewhich would bind migrants to living in communities of fewer than 100,000 residents. On justice, NZ Firstwants to create an American-style ‘‘degrees ofmurder’’ system which would see ‘‘first degree murder’’ warrant a life sentence. The party would also introduce a lawto punish ‘‘dangerous littering’’, andwould commit to recruiting 1000 more frontline police officers. It would also ‘‘take regulatory action’’ againstmassive tech platforms Facebook, Google, and Youtube, to compel the owners to ‘‘pay their share’’ in Newzealand. A contestable ‘‘public good’’ journalism fund would be created.