The Environment Court went "a step too far" when it declined consents for the Project Hayes wind farm, the two councils whose consents were overturned say.
The Central Otago District Council and Otago Regional Council have joined with Meridian Energy in appealing the court decision and presented their case to the appeal hearing in the High Court at Dunedin yesterday.
The Environment Court found Meridian's proposed $2 billion 176-turbine wind farm on the Lammermoor Range, which would be the largest in the southern hemisphere, was inappropriate in the outstanding natural landscape.
The positive factors of Project Hayes were outweighed by the adverseconsequences, it said.
It was critical of both councils and said they, together with Meridian and the Crown, had failed to put full evidence before the court on the efficient use of all the relevant natural and physical resources of the Lammermoor.
Appearing for the councils, Alastair Logan told Justices Lester Chisholm and John Fogarty yesterday that the Environment Court's decision was wrong in saying there was a need for cost benefit analysis of the proposal and a need to consider alternatives to the proposal.
"The Environment Court judgement departs from the conventional decision-making framework, not only for wind farms, but for resource consent applications generally," Mr Logan said.
"It has implications beyond the Project Hayes application - potentially [for] all consent applications."
An investigation into alternative proposals was unworkable and unreasonable, he said.
The court's decision "interwove" costs and benefits and references to alternatives with the court's discussion of landscape and heritage.
Justice Chisholm said, on the face of it, the Environment Court had gone outside the district plan, and created the area as an outstanding landscape, even though it was not classified as one in the district plan.
The Environment Court also erred in taking TrustPower's proposed Mahinerangi wind farm into account and considering the cumulative effects of two wind farms within the same visual catchment, Mr Logan said.
Mahinerangi and Project Hayes occupied the same broad landscape but did not use the same site, or same wind resource.
Both proposals went to appeal.
Meridian applied first for consent, but the Mahinerangi proposal was consented first.
