Representing the landowner's interests and environmental values while a major geothermal power station was built across its estate.
Ngatamariki Geothermal Power Station
Ngatamariki is one of New Zealand's largest geothermal power stations, an 82 MW binary plant 17 kilometres from Taupō, built and operated by Mighty River Power, now Mercury, as part of its renewable portfolio. It sits at the centre of five extraction and reinjection wells, some drilled more than 3,500 metres down, on Wairakei Pastoral Estate land in a working farming and forestry landscape.
Wairakei Pastoral Estate brought RCP in as its Client Representative, the landowner's eyes on a project it did not control. RCP monitored the developer's compliance with the development agreements and, in particular, held it to the estate's aspiration to minimise the station's environmental impact, above ground and across the deep geothermal field below.
The environmental mitigation initiatives built into the station were a first for New Zealand's power industry and set a benchmark for the projects that followed. Generating around 700 GWh a year, enough for roughly 80,000 homes, Ngatamariki runs on the estate's land on terms it could stand behind.
