Low-energy wind turbines chill couple
Installation-company owner told to pay $30,000 due to failures, as warning given on ‘cheap Chinese’ products
Marcel and Sandra Hannon had just built their dream Waikato home in
2018 but still shivered through a cold winter with limited heating.
“It was miserable, it really ruined the whole experience for us,” Marcel Hannon says.
The problem was an off-grid power system: the Hannons paid more than $40,000 for it but it barely generated any electricity, he says.
He accuses installation company LZ Lighting’s owner Liberio Riosa of buying “rubbish” wind turbines from a Chinese website and installing them at his home near Cambridge for a premium price.
Designed to produce up to 1000 watts an hour each, the turbines instead maxed out at about 250 watts in high winds, Marcel claims.
Riosa told the Herald he could not comment.
But the Disputes Tribunal has ordered Riosa to pay $30,000 for the failed products, and the Sustainable Energy Association of NZ has confirmed it has “terminated” Riosa’s membership.
Marcel says bad experiences like his could tarnish the promising green energy industry.
“You think it is a no-brainer going off-grid. No more power bills, probably more reliable power because we live rural and in the winter you lose power every now and then — yet it didn’t turn out that way,” he says.
After LZ Lighting installed the wind turbines on their property in
2018, it took the Hannons until February this year to win their Disputes Tribunal ruling against the company.
In the months since, LZ Lighting has failed to pay the $30,000 in compensation.
Marcel is trying to force the company into liquidation to reclaim his money, but worries he will never see it.
Riosa continues to advertise the sale of similar wind turbines and solar panels through another company he operates, Dynamic Energy.
Marcel says he and his wife decided to buy an off-grid electricity setup for their newbuild home on the family’s “windy“farm, near Cambridge, because — at their remote location — it was priced similar to the main power grid’s connection fee.
And so after meeting a LZ Lighting employee at Hamilton’s Home Show in 2017, they accepted a quote that year.
But the turbines failed to work efficiently from the start, Marcel says.
He asked Riosa to fix them, but the issues were never resolved.
Riosa told him he would fly to China to gather the turbine, battery and inverter manufacturers all in one room to fix the problem.
Marcel believed the claim was “fantasy”.
He then paid two experts to inspect the turbines’ performance.
Engineer Paul Botha from Roaring40s Wind Power, who consults on large wind farms, told Marcel that based on his calculations the turbines would likely produce only a quarter of the claimed 1000 watts per hour output.
The reason for that was because the ability of the turbines’ “sails” to catch wind was so poor, Botha said.
Sustainable Energy Association of NZ (SEANZ) member Ben Stanton also visited the Hannons’ property and concluded LZ Lighting had “failed to provide a functional system as they were contracted to do”.
He also noted a safety risk because the turbines were rusting just two years after installation.
Kristin Gillies, spokesman for SEANZ, says the association is aware of the Hannons’ complaint and that Stanton investigated.
He says SEANZ terminated the membership of Riosa’s other company, Dynamic Energy, in July 2020.
“Subsequent applications for membership by Liberio Riosa have been declined. Any further detail is confidential.”
The Hannons ultimately paid $42,646.81 of the $53,308.51 quoted by LZ Lighting, after refusing to make a final payment when they discovered the turbines didn’t work.
But Marcel says he also spent money laying concrete foundations for the turbines as well as about $600 a month on diesel for a power generator he set up when the off-grid system didn’t work.
Disputes Tribunal referee Sara Grayson backed Marcel’s claims, finding Riosa engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct by selling turbines that did not work as advertised.
She ordered Riosa to pay the Hannons the maximum compensation amount possible in the Disputes Tribunal of $30,000.
SEANZ’s Gillies says the market for off-grid electricity set-ups is still relatively small in New Zealand.
However, it is part of much larger and booming renewable energy sector in which many Kiwis are buying solar and wind generators to complement their power grid connections.
Gillies says his team is not receiving many complaints from customers about faulty renewable energy setups.
However, because the sector is “expanding at a great rate of knots“some inexperienced or opportunistic people are importing “cheap Chinese” kit and doing faulty set-ups.
He advised customers to always use a SEANZ member because the association vetted its members and turned down about 20 per cent of applications from installers.
“All our members have been in the industry for some time and have references. We do background checks on the security of their business and that they’ve got New Zealand-based directors,” Gillies says.
“And if there is a problem we’ll intervene, we’ll get someone to inspect, we’ll mediate and work to get a solution when one of our members is involved and sometimes when it isn’t one of our members.”