You could spot the townies by their shoes at the Lauriston Solar Farm opening.

White flats and polished dress shoes were not as suited for the muddy paddock as the gumboots donned by local councillors.

But despite the muddied shoes, there was a shared optimism in the room about what this Mid Canterbury solar farm could mean for New Zealand’s energy future.

A group of Lauriston School students opened the event with a spirited waiata - they didn’t seem to notice the cold.

“The song they sang, that their kaiako had taught them, was so beautiful,” said Arowhenua pūkōrero Awatea Edwin.

“[It likens] their growth to being a small rock that grows up into a mountain.”

Edwin is often involved with building openings and blessing spaces, but said the solar farm was a story he was genuinely proud of.

“We have a huge concern about the quality of our whenua, and we’ve watched it over the centuries being slowly destroyed by all sorts of things.

“So when big corporate bodies like Genesis come forward and offer to do something that’s actually much kinder to the environment, [that’s] something we can definitely get behind.

“I was thinking about those little kids, when they grow up, I want them to feel proud of what’s happened before them, and that we’ve [made] a change from being destructive to being a bit more constructive.”

To Edwin, harnessing the sun’s power aligns with local tales and knowledge.

“We have an Atua, one of our great spirits, which is the sun, Tamanui Te Rā.

“His daughter Aōmiria becomes the rays of the sun, so we’re accessible to her.

“So my view is that she’s giving us this great energy source.”

Arowhenua were represented at the opening alongside Genesis energy, Beon Energy, Spark, and local councillors and MPs.

An important crowd for an important opening - the Lauriston Solar farm is currently the largest solar farm in the country.

It’s big by the numbers - 93 hectares filled with 90,000 solar panels, each the size of a man and capable of generating 100 gigawatt hours a year.

That’s enough for nearly 13,000 households in a year - as of 2018, there were 13,083 houses in the Ashburton District.

So the farm will benefit us, but what interest did energy giants like Genesis have in Mid Canterbury, of all places?

It turns out this district is a perfect solar guinea pig.

“The role of solar in our portfolio is to help us turn [hydro] lakes into batteries,” Genesis chief executive Malcolm Johns said, “to support those cold winter nights, and times when the wind’s not blowing.

“On a cold winter night in Canterbury, when everybody turns their heaters on, cooks their dinners, and plugs their electric cars in, you use an enormous amount of electricity.

“The more water you can keep in your lakes, the more energy you have stored.”

Before the solar farm, Ashburton’s electricity came from the national grid and the hydro power stations in the Rangitata Diversion Race.

Those hydro stations can hold and store water, like a battery storing charge, until people need the power it generates.

The Lauriston Solar Farm isn’t set up to store power, just to generate it.

So when the skies are clear and the sun’s out, those panels will be providing our power.

It’s particularly handy for us because in summer, we receive less rain but use more water from the RDR for irrigation, meaning there’s less local power to go around.

The other thing about Mid Canterbury that caught corporate eyes were the substations.

“The toughest part of building new, renewable generation is [finding] a point that you can connect to the grid,” Johns said; “[a] substation is our ‘on ramp’ to the ‘motorway’ for our electrons.”

“The beauty of Lauriston was that we had a substation down the road that wasn’t at full capacity.

“And Leeston’s the same.”

That’s right - a second large solar farm in Mid Canterbury is already on the cards for that same group of power companies.

“We started building here in Lauriston, found out about Leeston, and decided to purchase that too.

“Leeston will be a twin… exactly the same size, exactly the same construction, and it will connect to the grid in exactly the same way, through the local lines company.”

Johns expects an investment decision to be made at the end of this year, and for site work to start in 2026.

That’s two massive solar farms in the region - but wait, there’s more.

A completely different group of companies, Ecotricity and Lightyears Solar, built a “medium-sized” solar farm in Willowby last year.

It’s eight hectares worth of panels with 7.2 megawatt capability - it could power 1800 houses for a year.

That doesn’t mean Ashburton will stop pulling electricity from the national grid; the sun isn’t always out, and our water gets used for irrigation still.

But having an additional electricity source should take financial weight off of the district, EA Networks chief executive Onno Mulder said.

“Increasing supply puts downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices that in-turn should flow through to customers.”

The solar farms also benefit the community by providing short-term work.

Genesis said 100 people were employed during the Lauriston farm’s construction.

While only three people will continue on with the farm, now the panels are operational, it provided a year’s worth of work for locals and local businesses.

And the land itself - while now covered in large, self-tilting rectangles - is not lost income.

Crop and sheep Bernard Daley intends to run sheep under the panels, and farm on the land that hasn’t been converted.

“I will still carry on my arable and stock grazing, but scaled back, which will be nice for me.”

The solar farm had been a long process for him: two years of paperwork, and one more to build the thing.

But it was worth investing in our region’s future, he said.

“I just liked the concept of clean, green energy, and being able to graze stock under the panels; It’s just another string to the bow, really.”

There’d been some community interest in the new use of his paddocks, he said, but none of it malicious.

“I had a lot of questions and that, probably people just naturally wanting to know what it entailed.

“I never had anyone say ‘what are you doing that for?’, it was all pretty positive feedback.”

Daley and his wife Nicky got to cut some ribbon - a white plastic roll covered in FRV and Genesis’ logos - after MP for Rangitata James Meager, Genesis’ Malcolm Johns, and FRV Australia’s chief business development officer Michael Steiner had had their turn.

The Lauriston Solar Farm, Aotearoa’s biggest sunshine farm, is now open for business.

If only the sun would come out to play…

by Anisha Satya