Lightyears Solar opens Waingawa Solar Farm

The lights are on at Waingawa Solar Farm, our latest community-scale project to go live.

The solar farm was officially opened by Energy Minister Simon Watts last week and is just out of Masterton in the Wairarapa. Its 7700 panels will generate 4.7 megawatts of electricity at peak output, enough to power 1100 homes annually through the local Powerco network.  

The farm is built over six hectares of a 12-hectare working farm and the panels are raised off the ground, allowing livestock to still graze the paddock. The panels are on trackers so they follow the sun as it moves across the sky, to increase power generation.  

L-R: Matt Shanks (Lightyears director), Mike Butterick (MP for Wairarapa), Simon Watts (Minister of Energy and Climate Change), Mark McGillicuddy (landowner), Amanda Hall (landowner).

Creating agrivoltaic, dual-use solar designs is a hallmark feature of our solar farms, and they maintain or increase the productivity of the land they occupy. The farms also help mitigate climate change and the lifetime carbon offset of the Waingawa Solar Farm is the equivalent of planting nearly 60,000 trees over 30 years.

“All our solar farms connect to local distribution networks, which is Powerco in this case. This provides electricity for the local district, growing the renewable proportion of power supply in the area,” says Matt Shanks, Lightyears’ co-founder and director.

In March this year, solar generation hit record highs in New Zealand and Lightyears’ medium-sized solar farms are now a vital part of our national solar infrastructure.

“We complement the larger scale solar farms, slotting into communities around the country and connecting to the local distribution networks.

“Increasing the amount of new generation is critical to help lower wholesale electricity prices and power bills for everyone. The size of our solar farms also mean they can be constructed quickly to provide renewable energy to the grid at a time when it’s desperately needed,” says Shanks.

“Solar also works well with New Zealand’s existing hydro and wind, making the grid more diverse and it provides energy when it is most used, in the daytime for business, industry and irrigation.”

The power produced at the Waingawa Solar Farm is purchased by Manawa Energy under a Power Purchase Agreement and the construction was carried out by sub-contractors Downer, Sol Srv – Solar Services and several local contractors.