Whakatāne Mayor Victor Luca says it is time for the district council to step up and show leadership around reducing emissions.

At a meeting on Thursday, Whakatāne District Council's energy, environment and resilience committee, which he chairs, discussed a scoping report the council had commissioned to investigate the potential for producing solar energy on council properties.

'New Zealand accounts for about 0.05 per cent of global emissions, which is bugger all,” says Victor.

'Some will take the view that shows we should do nothing. But there's also the argument that if a country like ours, that is relatively prosperous, cannot do the right thing, and reduce its emissions, then why on earth would China - which is now the biggest emitter on the planet - ever try and do anything? Or India for that matter, or the United States?

'As community leaders it is also incumbent on us to show leadership, and that includes reducing our own emissions. So this [report] can contribute to that as well.

He says localised energy production will also provide the community with greater energy resilience in times of crisis.

'We've just seen how, when you've got a non-distributed system with centralised generation, you knock out one part of it and you've taken out the lot.”

Victor says New Zealand is 'almost completely dependent on hydro generation”, which is not going to see any increases in capacity in the near future.

'Our energy requirements are going to increase by at least 40 percent by 2040 and probably double or triple by 2050. We're not going to have enough power in this country.

'If everybody wants their lights to go on and has got used to living with power, you might want to give some consideration to increasing generation capacity.”

However, there's 'a lot of water to go under the bridge” before the council can make any decisions on solar energy options.

'There is a lot to weigh up in terms of models and how exactly you structure these things.”

Victor says there are at least three big companies putting in utility scale solar farms in the Whakatāne district already, 'because they have noticed that we are very sunny”.

Local Democracy Reporting has previously published a story about the Lodestone Energy building, a 32MW solar farm in Edgecumbe.

He says Helios Energy is also quite far advanced in building an 110MW solar farm in Edgecumbe and he understands Far North Solar is also looking into the area.

'The original proposals that we put in preceded that. Now they're here, and they're not there for a haircut. They're here to make money.”

He says a lot of other territorial authorities around the country are also getting into the solar energy game.

'New Plymouth [council] is about to build a solar farm, Christchurch has a massive solar farm going in by their airport. I think it's time for us to step up.”

Council still considering whether to consider solar farm?

During his presentation to Whakatāne's energy, environment and resilience committee yesterday, strategy and transformation general manager Steven Perdia called Local Democracy Reporting's story on the solar energy scoping study into question.

'Some of you may have seen the headline in the article yesterday about this report, but I can assure you that the headline doesn't reflect the actual content of the report.

'We haven't proposed a 7.2MW solar farm. We haven't proposed that council use $16 million to pursue these projects. We haven't proposed a community solar farm. What we have proposed is that council include this report in the Climate Change Strategy review process where it can be considered alongside other projects.”

Steven says the report had been instigated after a discussion at the end of last year that Solar PV (photovoltaic) had become 'a hot topic”.

'There were some funding pots that were becoming available ... We decided to go ahead and commission a report that gave us more information on how we might consider solar projects in the future and what sort of information was currently available, what criteria would you use... and what information didn't we have available should we want to make some funding applications in the future.

'It is only an investigation report, and it was largely about educating us about what sort of criteria you might consider in a solar pv and also understanding what information we currently have available and what information we might need to gather."

Victor thanked Steven for 'setting the record straight”.

"I've got to say that when I saw the newspaper front page, I just about fell off the sofa.

Councillor John Pullar clarified the issue further.

'These are only options and we are not going to dive into it at this stage.”

-Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.