Navigation for News Categories
Lightyears Solar’s brand-new Ashburton and Wairarapa solar farms are currently under building, the business states. Submit picture.
Image: 123RF
Solar power business Lightyears Solar has actually raised $6 million to construct 3 brand-new solar farms in Canterbury and Wairarapa over the next year.
The community-scale farms would produce 18 megawatts (MW) of energy, enough to power almost 4000 homes.
Lightyears Solar, which runs one solar farm in Auckland’s Waiuku, likewise had a $25m loan from New Zealand Green Investment Finance.
The business’s co-founder and advancement supervisor Matt Shanks, stated the Ashburton and Wairarapa farms were currently under building and construction.
He stated the business was concentrated on community-scale farms.
“If we’re talking in megawatts, the majority of our farms remain in that sort of 5 to 15MW variety, which is a little bit of a sweet area for us,” Shanks stated.
“One of the factors we’re establishing at that scale is since they suit well into the existing power networks, and likewise they’re relatively low effect to the neighborhoods they’re in.”
When the Canterbury and Wairarapa farms were functional, Lightyears would have 20MW of solar farms in its portfolio, and would start building and construction of 60MW of tasks in 2025.
The capital raise was led by business and commercial seller Prime Energy and financier Rowan Simpson’s Hoku Group.
Prime Energy president Michael Skates, stated it was an “extremely appealing” financial investment chance.
“The New Zealand electrical energy market frantically requires to increase its eco-friendly generation capability to be able to decarbonise the nation and Lightyears Solar are the idea of the spear in doing so, by means of their special, community-scale farms,” he stated.