Project Hayes

Ratepayers will be footing the bill - $211,000- for the Central Otago District Council's involvement in the Project Hayes appeal.

In the wake of the Project Hayes decision, it is business as usual for Contact Energy, weighing up options for hydro development on the Clutha River, and Pioneer Generation, looking at small-scale wind farms.

Energy company Meridian is withdrawing its Environment Court appeal for resource consents for Project Hayes, the wind farm proposed for the Lammermoor Range in Central Otago.

Six years after it announced plans for a controversial $2 billion wind farm on the Lammermoor Range and after spending $8.9 million on the project, Meridian Energy has pulled the pin on them.

Was Meridian Energy's decision late last week to shelve its $2 billion Project Hayes wind farm in Central Otago a lost opportunity for establishing renewable energy in this country on a grand scale - or simply a "prudent commercial decision" by the power company giant?

All parties involved in the battle over Project Hayes agree on one thing - it has been an expensive exercise.

The $2 billion Project Hayes wind farm is still in limbo, tied up in legal proceedings, almost five years after Meridian Energy first sought resource consent for the project.

The Project Hayes appeal decision will have an impact on all infrastructure providers, lawyers and a national wind energy group says.

Project Hayes is going back to the Environment Court, following a High Court decision one submitter believes "opens the door" for the wind farm to proceed.

The Environment Court decision on the Project Hayes wind farm had set a new test for any major project, one that was unprecedented, impractical and perverse, Meridian Energy counsel Hugh Rennie told the appeal hearing in the High Court at Dunedin yesterday.

The value of the Lammermoor Range landscape dominated much of the discussion on the final day of the main appeal against the Environment Court's Project Hayes decision in the High Court at Dunedin yesterday.

A battle between scientists was the likely outcome of reconsidering climate change issues in the Project Hayes wind farm case, Justice John Fogarty said in the Dunedin High Court yesterday.

After four years of wrangling, appeal hearings in two different courts and several million dollars spent, the future of the Project Hayes wind-farm proposal on the Lammermoor Range may be debated again in a rehearing.