TRANSCRIPTION Company:
Mercury
Date:
13 September 2022
Duration:
19 minutes
Reservation Number:
10025340
[START OF TRANSCRIPT]
Operator:
Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Mercury announcement. All participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Vince Hawksworth, Chief Executive. Please go ahead.
Vince Hawksworth:
Thank you Marina, everybody. I'm joined by William Meek, our CFO. So this morning we announced the decision to go ahead with Kaiwera Downs Wind Farm just south of Gore. We're going ahead with the first stage of the wind farm, which is a 43 megawatt build, 10 machines, about $115 million, excluding capitalised interest. So we see this as a sensible next step in terms of our growth towards being a major player in the decarbonization of New Zealand. It establishes the wind farm at Gore at Kaiwera Downs and gives us the optionality on the further build that could take the wind farm up to 240 megawatts.
Vince Hawksworth:
Look, we acknowledge that there is uncertainty in the marketplace, but we also think that if New Zealand doesn't start this construction phase, we won't reach net zero and I think it's important to show that the players in the market are able to bring projects to market and deliver them. The great thing about Kaiwera Downs is it's an excellent project. It's been a long time in the making from the original resource consent gained by Trustpower. It was then in the Tilt book that Mercury gained with the transaction to acquire New Zealand Tilt Renewable's assets and pipeline. It's an excellent project from a point of view of performance, we will be using the best possible technology with 10 4.3 Megawatt machines and we are partnering with Vestas ElectroNet, PowerNet and Higgins to deliver the project under a collective set of contracts that will be coordinated by Mercury.
Vince Hawksworth:
So that's the project. We are pretty excited about it. We expect to kick off within weeks, so we expect to see mobilisation occur and see the project under construction in October. We would expect to see machines being erected around about the middle of next year and the project complete well within the calendar year. So a bit of work to do comes on the back of our Turitea project, which we are now still expecting to have complete around the middle of