Wind farms need a holistic approach

Why are we dealing with wind farms on a case-by-case basis rather than through a comprehensive approach to the entire country in terms of the best places - landscape sensitivities as well as wind generation - to place these?

In Scotland the government has funded heritage and conservation agencies to look at the entire country in terms of high to medium to low sensitivity for wind farms. Assessing these on heritage, geomorphology, ecology and so on. A major sifting process.

The success of this approach is shown in developers now being more focused and pragmatic about where they propose wind farms.

By contrast, in NZ we have wind farm proposals bogged down in the Environment Court, and in the past a cluttering effect as accumulated wind farms appear in a single area. 

The Environment Court's decision that a wind farm proposal has to be considered not just on its own landscape effects but on the 'cumulative' effects of all wind farms being proposed in one area seeks to prevent this. However, in response to this ruling we now have developers rushing to get in first, often to the detriment of the reason for their proposal in the first place: to produce wind power as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

Another issue often raised is the question of large versus small wind farms, unfortunately in practice it is not that simple. For example, the Te Awhitu wind farm - once officially on hold because its small scale was considered not cost-effective enough - is an 18 megawatt farm that caused enormous opposition at Waiuku. By contrast another wind farm - HMR to the south of the Waikato River - planned at 520 megawatts, and yet the level of opposition has been much less. To generate the amount of power from HMR you'd have to put up with 35 communities like Waiuku in anguish around the country.

So this is a complex situation with a panorama of issues, and what we seem to lack right now is national leadership from government in getting the best outcomes possible from our country's wind energy potential.