Feature
Putting the wind up
by Bruce Ansley
With its tiny population and big, empty landscape, Central Otago is the perfect place for a huge wind farm, according to Meridian. But as well as incensing conservationists, the power company’s proposal is splitting a small farming community.
The day isn’t breaking here in Alexandra. It has sneaked off, leaving just a glimmer. At ground level, it’s scarcely lighter than night. The fog is so thick that locals haven’t seen the sun in two days and the weather office says it may stay this way for a week.
The landscape is frozen. White foxgloves stand to attention, birches are stiff as doilies. It’s -4˚C in Alex and down the road in Omakau it’s said to be -9˚, but I don’t get out to check in case some extremity drops off. After a night in a motel built by Frigidaire here in the heart of hydro-electricity country, I say: throw all the switches.
Wait. As we skirt the Raggedy Range, delicately on the ice and grit, the fog thins, we surface to the day. Central Otago spreads like a feast under the sun.
Ahead lies the open country and its glistening villages: Lauder, Becks, Oturehua, Wedderburn. Naseby huddles in its crevice away to the left, snow all over its roofs. The Kakanui Mountains run down to the east over passes whose names tell old stories: Dead Horse Pinch, Pig Root.
This land makes poets sing, artists toil into the night. Brian Turner and Grahame Sydney live right here, on the job. You could say that before the poet and the artist went to work, before someone tore up the railway line and gave the nation the Otago Central Rail Trail, no one took much notice of the Maniototo, other than to ask how far it was to Queenstown. “Once, you passed through it on the way to the glittering prizes,” says Turner. “When I was a boy, asking Dad to take me to the fabled places, the common view was that there was nothing there. You had to be discerning to detect its charm.”
Now books eulogise it. Sydney’s paintings are celebrated in Auckland. He talks of subtlety and quiet miracles. Central Otago has become a refuge for the rich and Turner notes an irony: “We’ve seen the flight of the wealthy, who’ve made their money helping to destroy other places, and have discovered a bolthole.”
Its history of gold-mining is everywhere. But now Central Otago is caught up in a new gold-rush. The place is becoming a wind-power hypermarket. Locals are running out of fingers to tot up proposals for new wind farms. Two are certain: TrustPower has already applied for consents for 150 wind turbines at Lake Mahinerangi. Meridian Energy says it will lodge consents for a huge wind farm on the Lammermoor Range in the Maniototo within the next few weeks. Another five proposals have been announced, more wait in the wings.
Isn’t that a good thing? A rising chorus says it may well be, but not on the sites chosen so far. They’re in full cry. “This is going to be one of the biggest environmental campaigns of all time,” promises poet Richard Reeve – quite a claim, given that New Zealand’s conservation movement started not far from here. Reeve’s Upland Landscape Protection Society sprang up and into action. It claims support from poets such as Cilla McQueen, writers like O E Middleton and artists including Marilynn Webb, who says: “Wind-farm proposals are going around like corporate chickenpox. I’m scared this wind-farm mania will fill Otago with them. We can’t have Otago becoming the wind-farm capital of the world.”
Hyperbole? Here’s Meridian spokesman Alan Seay: “We’re the Saudi Arabia of wind.”
Wind is filling the embarrassing gap in our electricity supply. The government expects it eventually to supply 35 percent of New Zealand’s electricity, a giant leap on previous estimates. It can be set up with no mucking around – from when the first sod was turned, Meridian’s Te Apiti wind farm in the Manawatu took just a year to begin producing.
Te Apiti is the biggest wind farm in the southern hemisphere. But the Maniototo project will be huge. Its 176 turbines will eventually produce 630MW of electricity. The Clyde dam near Alexandra generates 400MW.
Size, however, doesn’t matter in this argument. Nor do the virtues of wind power. It’s where the turbines are going that’s causing uproar. They’ll jut out of pristine landscapes, many virtually untouched, all superb.
It’s not only artists crying out. Here’s All Black Anton Oliver: “The wind-farm abomination simply cannot proceed. I care about my country, and the earth, and want future generations of New Zealanders to be able to experience nature in the same silent simplicity that I have.” And lichenologist David Galloway: “The wind farms in the alpine grasslands and their vast scale of construction roading mean vast areas of habitat destruction and pillaging of microbial diversity.” And farmers …
For the moment, the Maniototo remains a peaceful place. The noticeboard talks of knitting days, the embroidery guild at Jane’s and the book club at Maureen’s. The Maniototo Leader reports curling in Naseby, a water supply for Oturehua at last, and grumbling over the cost of maintaining Ranfurly’s tenuous art deco image.
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