A North Otago community-financed company owning a wind farm generating electricity on the Kakanui Mountains is the vision behind Waitaki Wind, which could start monitoring two sites within a month.
Initial details of Waitaki Wind Ltd, set up in May by former Waitaki Mayor Alan McLay and former Meridian Energy Ltd chief executive Keith Turner, were revealed in June.
Yesterday, Mr McLay and Dr Turner, Waitaki Wind's sole shareholders and directors, outlined more details after reaching agreement with two landowners on the Kakanui Mountains to install wind-monitoring towers and - if the scheme proves viable - construct and operate a wind farm.
Dr Turner said it was too early to tell how big the wind farm would be.
"If it was up to 100MW, a project of that scale could cost upwards of $250 million to $300 million, so it's quite large."
The company has a loan of about $100,000 from a consortium of four local investors.
He would not name the investors at this stage.
The loan will help finance two 30m-tall wind monitoring towers on two sites about 20km apart - one at Mt Stalker (owned by Mt Stalker Ltd and managed by Hamish Paterson) and the other at Dome Hills (owned by the Douglas family for three generations).
Data would be collected for at least six months.
If the sites proved promising, another two monitoring towers, up to 80m tall, would be considered.
The investigative phase, aimed at finding out whether there was an economic wind resource, could cost $150,000 or more.
"That is the absolute core of this work,"Dr Turner said. "Until you have measured the wind, and done so for at least six months, you really don't know whether there is a project there or not."
After that, it would take at least three months to analyse the data and make a decision on the viability of the sites.
The next step would be preliminary design work.
Resource consents would need to be sought from the Waitaki District Council and possibly the Otago Regional Council. Obtaining resource consents could cost up to $2 million.
At this stage, Waitaki Wind has not determined how it will fund the consents process.
If consent was granted, the final steps would be determining whether the project was economically viable (which could take six to 12 months), raising capital and building the wind farm.
Both sites were "very remote". They could not be seen from Oamaru, and no-one lived within 5km of them.
The land being investigated had no conservation value, and both sites were being used for sheep farming.
The sites had access to Transpower transmission lines - Dome Hills to the 220kV Livingstone line and Mt Stalker to the 110kV coastal line.
Dr Turner said Waitaki Wind wanted to create an electricity generation project that was locally-owned, with the benefits flowing directly into the North Otago community.
"There is a lot still to be done to turn that into a reality."
If the project was commercially viable, Dr Turner hoped could be financed by entities, companies and individuals in North Otago.
The wind farm could be a valuable investment for farmers, irrigation companies and Holcim New Zealand, whose proposed cement plant in the Waiareka Valley would be a heavy user of electricity.
Other potential investors could be community-owned companies.
It could also be "of great interest" to Network Waitaki - the North Otago power lines company owned by the community, he said.
"We think there could be a large number of investors who want to hedge their electricity costs over a long period of time."
While not getting electricity direct from the wind farm, the return on their investment would help offset the cost of their electricity.
Construction and operation of a wind farm would also provide major spin-offs for the local community, ranging from building the wind farm to distributing the electricity.
