When the Wind Blows

Merid­i­an Ener­gy have announced plans for a new wind farm at and around Quartz Hill, near Makara. With around 70 tur­bines planned for the farm, and each one of those three times big­ger than the one on Brook­lyn, there’s the poten­tial for 210 megawatts of pow­er to be pro­duced — enough for 100000 house­holds, or, more sim­ply, all of Welling­ton and the Hutt.

While the Makara com­mu­ni­ty seems poised to fight the plan, we here at the Welling­ton­ist seem to be veer­ing to the side of ‘bring it on!’. The farm will make Welling­ton ener­gy self-suf­fi­cient, it turns one of our per­ceived neg­a­tives (bloody wind!) into a fan­tas­tic pos­i­tive, and $100m will spent local­ly dur­ing con­struc­tion.

As much as some peo­ple might feel the scenery is being destroyed by the mon­ster wind machines, oth­er peo­ple will like­wise think they’re some­thing they might want to go and see. They are, after all, quite pret­ty. Real­ly. And sev­en­ty sky­scraper tall tur­bines going at full tilt in a decent Welling­ton gale will look amaz­ing.