A new look for a new year: Our updated brand
It’s a new year and we’ve started 2025 with a new look and a slightly different name. Gone is our old logo with its sunrays and navy-blue tones, and in its place is a fresh look, with a trio of solar panels, representing our core areas of work and expertise: development, construction, and operations and maintenance.
This growth is also represented by our updated name, as we’re now simply Lightyears - no longer just a small solar farm developer, but a business that has a lot more strings to its bow, and big plans for the future.
What hasn’t changed is our mission to bring renewable energy to more of Aotearoa.
Our story:
How we started
Lightyears started in 2019 when two old friends saw an opportunity in New Zealand for large-scale solar to meet New Zealand’s electricity demand, to reduce carbon emissions and to help address energy poverty and increase access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy services.
Our first project was the 4.37MW Naumai Solar Farm south of Dargaville, which we sold shovel-ready to Infratec NZ, a division of WEL Networks, in 2022. This is now operational, providing for the majority of Ruawai district’s daytime energy needs.
How we’ve grown
Since that first shovel-ready project, we have built the Waiuku Solar Farm, we’re generating power at the solar farm we’ve built in Ashburton and our Waingawa Solar Farm is in the final testing stages. There is also a long list of projects that will break ground in the next few years.
We have carved out a niche with our mid-sized, dual-use approach, building on existing farmland where productive agriculture exists, and can continue alongside solar, and using a tracked system where panels tilt with the sun and animals graze underneath.
We have built a multi-faceted business with a growing list of things we excel at:
Developing projects to shovel-ready stage
Building, owning and operating our own solar farms
Joint venture projects
EPC work (Engineering, Procurement, Construction)
Selling renewable energy produced by our farms via Power Purchase Agreements
Our team
We started as a two-man band, and we’re now bursting at the seams of our office, with our two directors/co-founders, a large engineering team, inhouse legal counsel, a finance and business team, marketing and communications and a construction team. This list doesn’t include our board of directors, who provide invaluable guidance and governance.
We have our investors to thank too, many of whom helped us launch right back in 2019, and others who have joined us along the way to help us build Lightyears into what it is today. We are also supported by a long-term debt facility from New Zealand Green Investment Finance.
What we’re all about
Despite our relative youth as a company, Lightyears has a wealth of experience and expertise in its ranks, and a depth of purpose to our work. We want to build more solar to power communities, provide greater access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy, and help New Zealand reach its climate targets.
Lightyears: Powering New Zealand’s Carbon Zero Future.