The Government signed off on two energy projects in two days last week that pull in opposite directions, and it presented both as answers to the same problem.
On Thursday 13 August, Resources Minister Shane Jones announced that New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals had granted a 10 year petroleum mining permit for the Puka field in onshore Taranaki. The following afternoon, Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones and Energy Minister Simeon Brown announced that a large solar farm near Foxton had cleared the fast-track process. One decision adds oil and gas. The other adds enough panels to cover more than 400 hectares of Manawatū farmland.
Genesis Energy’s Foxton Solar Farm sits about 10 kilometres north of the town in the Manawatū-Whanganui region. It covers 436 hectares and would carry roughly 150,000 panels. Genesis lodged the application in February and the decision arrived about three and a half months after an independent expert panel was appointed. According to the ministers’ release, it is the 32nd project approved under the Fast-track Approvals Act and the eighth renewable energy project to get through.
Bishop said the 220 MWp solar farm “will generate approximately 345 GWh of renewable electricity annually, enough to power approximately 47,000 homes”, and that “reliable renewable electricity generation is critical to supporting economic growth and regional resilience”. Jones said the project “will provide around 100 jobs during construction and contribute directly and indirectly to the local economy”. Brown framed it as a supply question, saying demand “is expected to increase significantly as New Zealanders increasingly go electric in everything from their bikes to their businesses”.
Genesis chief operating officer Tracey Hickman told the NZ Herald the approval “moves another significant renewable project forward as we invest in the generation New Zealand will need for a more secure and increasingly renewable electricity system”. Genesis already runs the Lauriston solar farm in Canterbury and has consented or planned projects at Tihori, Rangiriri and Leeston.
The land itself is part of the political argument. The site is currently used for livestock and dairy farming, and the ministers’ release says the switch to panels would stop the leaching of the equivalent of around 25,700 kilograms of nitrogen a year. That is an unusual selling point for a power station, and it reflects how solar developers have learned to answer the standard objection that good farmland is being taken out of production. The expert panel that approved the project accepted that the benefits were significant at a regional and national level, resting mainly on the amount of renewable electricity generated and supported by construction jobs and local spending. Project documents are published on the fast-track website.
Taken together, the renewable projects approved under fast-track now add more than 990 megawatts of new generating capacity, which the Government says is more than five per cent of New Zealand’s current capacity and enough for about 322,000 households. The list includes the Southland Wind Farm at up to 380 megawatts and the Māhinerangi Wind Farm in Otago. That is a record worth noting, because it is not the record critics expected when the law went through Parliament.
The Fast-track Approvals Act was one of the most contested pieces of legislation of the last term. Forest and Bird campaigned hard against it, warning that the regime would let coal and gold be dug up, the seabed be mined and rivers be dammed with little regard for the environment or affected communities, and the organisation’s chief executive Nicola Toki said at the time that New Zealand already had the highest proportion of threatened species in the world. The Government amended the bill so that final decisions sat with expert panels rather than three ministers. The mining approvals critics feared have arrived, starting with the Waihi North gold project in December 2025. So has a run of wind and solar.
The Puka permit is smaller in every sense. It covers about 19 square kilometres of onshore Taranaki and was granted to Matahio NZ Onshore Limited, which estimates recoverable reserves of roughly 170,000 barrels of oil and 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas from the existing discovery, with a further prospect named Oru inside the permit area. That is a modest volume against national gas demand, but the politics are larger than the field. The coalition has spent the term arguing that new gas is needed to keep the lights on while renewables are built, and the opposition parties argue the money would be better spent on the renewables themselves.
That argument now runs straight into the election on 7 November, with voting opening on 26 October. Labour announced a SolarSaver package in July costing $160 million over four years, funded by repurposing the coalition’s gas security fund, with low cost loans through lines companies and rule changes for renters wanting plug in solar. The Greens have proposed a public energy utility under the name Kiwipower along with money for community owned generation. Households have a live reason to care, because wholesale gas prices spiked after conflict in the Middle East and fed through to power bills in July. If you want to work out where the parties actually sit before you vote, our voting tool compares their positions side by side.
None of this is generation yet. A fast-track approval is a consent, not a construction contract, and Genesis has not confirmed a start date or a final investment decision for Foxton. The same caution applies to Puka, where a permit is permission to produce rather than production. What last week did show is that the two energy tracks the Government has been running for two years are now both delivering paperwork at the same time, and voters will get to judge the combination in November.
What do you make of the Government approving a large solar farm and a new oil and gas permit in the same week? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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