Podcast: Sunny Days for Solar - Jason Foden, Rānui Generation (edited excerpt)
Listen to the full episode here.
Vincent
“The Twin Rivers solar project could power 6,000 households or 25,000 electric vehicles for a whole year. And it's the first of four solar farms planned around the country by Rānui. Where is it?”
Jason
“It's a little place called Pamapuria, which is just south of Kaitaia. As the name suggests, there are two rivers that go around it, and it's off the road, so you'd be very hard-pressed to see it, which is a great thing, because people want to consume the electricity. They don't really want to see it."
Vincent
“So you purchase a piece of land, and is there a kind of a minimum size that makes it economically viable to build a solar farm?”
Jason
“Our size was really the ideal size for connecting into the local substation. If you go really, really large or if you generate a lot of power, which you might do from wind as well, you might build your own substation. But the capital requirement is obviously much larger. So, there's a sweet spot that we were looking for between 30 and 40 megawatts, which is what we were targeting here.”
Vincent
“How soon can your solar projects start to contribute to generation capacity?"
Jason
"We're targeting June next year. It takes around nine months to build a solar site. While solar farms actually come on reasonably quickly compared to building a dam or wind farms, it still takes a little bit of time. And there's a little bit of complexity in terms of plugging it into the grid, which Top Energy are helping us with up north.”
Vincent
“Farms like this kind of make sense in that they are starting to distribute generation capacity out to the regions and where they're needed. That seems logical but do the economics stack up for you?"
Jason
“Absolutely. It really stacks up when wholesale rates are high. But, over time, as we see more solar farms come on board, we'll likely see prices fall. The whole market is driven by supply and demand. So, at the moment, we've got increasing demand through electric vehicles, population growth, data centres, etcetera. It means, and we've got really limited supply currently, and gas is contributing to that as well. We see, as Rānui, the opportunity to enter into the market and participate in the supply side, and then that will even out. The market will get back into balance as there's more supply.”
Listen to the full episode here.
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