The solar farms and the bird factory

Saturday, 3 August 2024

Solar farms are about to spread across New Zealand amid surging demand for renewable energy. Where some see opportunity, others see a threat; no more so than in the Mackenzie Basin, where solar farms and one of the world’s rarest birds will share what remains of a transformed landscape. CHARLIE MITCHELL reports.

This story is featured on Stuff’s The Long Read podcast. Check it out by hitting the play button below, or find it on podcast apps like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Every kakī alive today is a miracle, and most of them came into the world here; a drab room near Twizel with the cheerless atmosphere of a staff kitchen.

It could be worse. In the wild, the world’s rarest wading bird has a 4% chance of reaching adulthood. Many are eaten; some freeze to death. Others wander around until they starve.

In this ageing DOC facility near the State Highway, they are hand-reared, made fat on a diet of minced ox hearts and cat biscuits. They have a warm hutch and occasional access to a pool. Most will survive to see the spring.

But it’s not always pleasant. Any time a human comes near, they play a recorded sound of an adult kakī screaming a warning.

“The last thing we want is for these birds to think that humans are friends,” says Liz Brown, a Department of Conservation (DOC) ranger who runs the captive kakī programme.

“They really don’t like us from the start, and we try to keep it that way.”

Kakī are small, slender wading birds found only in New Zealand. They scavenge for insects along braided rivers. Their bodies are jet black as if slicked in oil; their eyes a deep, paranoid red.

The effort to save the species from extinction is one of New Zealand’s great conservation victories. When the captive programme began in 1981, the world’s kakī population had dropped to only 23 birds.

Now, thanks to this life-raft in the heart of Te Manahuna (the Mackenzie Basin), the species is out of immediate danger.

The Press is visiting the programme in difficult times. Bird flu is looming overseas; if it spread here, it would be an existential threat to this and other native birds. Predators continue to run rampant. DOC, which runs this programme, is under financial pressure. And kakī numbers are growing slower than anyone would like.

It’s not for lack of effort. Each spring, DOC staff scour Te Manahuna for kakī nests. They take the eggs and hand-rear the resulting chicks in captivity. They are then released into the wild as sub-adults, having spent the most vulnerable part of their lives in captivity.

Even with this help, progress has been agonisingly slow. In 2001, a kakī recovery plan aimed to have 250 breeding birds within 10 years. Today, there are only around 80. There are fewer kakī than kākāpō and takahe; a population sufficiently small that each bird could be remembered with a name.

Most, however, are not.

“Anything that gets named, dies,” Brown says, grimly. “So we tend not to name things.”

A thing of beauty

As the kakī population veered towards extinction, its world shrank to a handful of braided river deltas in a strange but striking part of the country.

Opinions vary on Te Manahuna, which, as a vista, is generally agreed to be spectacular rather than beautiful.

An amphitheatre of snow-capped mountains clash with a featureless brown basin. Glacial retreat has left the land flat and scarred, almost death-like. It is the closest thing New Zealand has to a desert, so dry the only trees of note are wilding pines.

When a massive hydro-scheme was proposed there in the 1960s, there was virtually no public opposition. By installing pretty hydro lakes, fringed by poplars and ornamental plantings, the landscape would become softer and more scenic.

The resulting Upper Waitaki hydroelectric scheme was, at the time, one of the world’s largest. It became the engine room of New Zealand’s electricity sector. It was also, some believed, a work of art. The project won awards for landscaping and praise for its sensitive design.

Not everyone felt Te Manahuna needed improvement.

Dr Susan Walker, a conservation ecologist at Landcare Research, offers an expert’s eye on the landscape. Where others see a vast but brutal environment, she sees a tapestry of plants and wildlife, ancient and perfectly adapted to an extreme environment.

“It has extraordinary values that no longer exist anywhere else but are really poorly appreciated because they’re not rainforest,” she says.

“It doesn’t leap out at people who are looking for tussocks or a more romantic vista.”

Walker is regularly called as an expert witness in court hearings to describe the ecological significance of what remains. Te Manahuna, she says, has the greatest area of historically rare ecosystems in New Zealand, remarkably intact even after so much development. It is why it’s important to protect what’s left; It cannot be rebuilt.

“If you know the flora and fauna, and you’ve got that context, it really is an extraordinary place that is not replicated anywhere in New Zealand, much less the world.”

It’s not always an easy case to make. Te Manahuna has been so intensively modified that it can feel synthetic.

Today, the land is punctured with concrete hydro dams; Sprawling pivot irrigators spray alien-like green discs in the yellowy tussock. The lakes rise and fall not with the weather, but with the nation’s electricity consumption.

What used to be swooping, ragged rivers packed with tuna (eels) have become straight and tidy canals containing freakishly large trout (a local pub proudly displays one roughly the size of a beagle). Even the colours look manipulated, like someone has increased the contrast setting to its maximum.

It has been described as an “electric landscape”, chopped up and reconfigured; rivers drained, refilled, and redirected in the same way a plumber would casually reorganise a pipe network. In Te Manahuna, even rare birds come out of a factory.

The factory

As we descend down a steep, muddy hill, two long barns appear in the distance, brutalist gray against the sun-scorched grass.

They are easily ignored in a landscape already stuffed with industrial clutter. Some locals assume they are greenhouses. They are actually aviaries, home to around 30% of the world’s kakī.

These impressive structures should not fool anyone into believing the programme is flush with cash. A former visitor centre on the site has been closed for years, shuttered and unstaffed. When two aviaries were damaged in heavy snow in 2015, DOC was reluctant to pay $500,000 for replacements — funding was instead sought from a global charity called Re:wild. You might not have heard of it, but you’re probably familiar with its celebrity founder. “We like to say that Leonardo DiCaprio built us a new aviary,” Brown says.

The other aviary remains on-site, and was recently condemned.

The industrialisation of Te Manahuna is obvious here, too. Above the aviaries is a tangle of thick black power lines, connecting to an electricity substation on a surrounding hill; You can hear the crackle of modernity overhead, snapping in the cold air.

Inside the aviaries, there is evidence of a dispute.

Kakī don’t like much, least of all other kakī: Between wire barriers, they squawk insults. They are territorial and rarely spend time in close quarters. It’s not the life anyone wants for these birds, least of all those tasked with caring for them.

“Long term, this is a very intensive and invasive way of increasing the population and it’s not something we want to be doing forever,” Brown says.

“The goal is to have a self-sustaining population. We’re a long way from that.”

In a good year, more than 100 hand-reared birds will be released. Of those, around 30% will survive a year. Another 25% of the wild adult population will die, too. The difference between those two numbers is the population change. Sometimes, it’s positive; sometimes negative. There’s no way to know in advance.

Improving these margins falls partly to DOC ranger Claudia Mischler. If the captive side of things ended today, she says, modelling shows kakī would be functionally extinct within a decade. The survival rate is just high enough to keep the population from plunging, but too low to be self-sustaining.

“Overall, the graph goes up — it just does this,” Mischler says, drawing a squiggly line in the air.

What is driving this squiggliness? There are some obvious suspects. Introduced predators — particularly cats, hedgehogs and stoats — prey on kakī. Some young birds appear to simply starve, unable to find food.

Another one is habitat loss. Kāki were once found everywhere south of Rotorua, but as predators spread, Te Manahuna became its final outpost. The surviving birds rarely leave, even in the frozen depths of winter, when the ice clings to their feathers.

It would be helpful if they returned to distant rivers, where their habitat could be better protected. As new industries have come to Te Manahuna, transforming the landscape, they have taken up space previously used by kakī. Birds have been seen wandering beneath pivot irrigators and swimming in effluent ponds. Rivers used for their habitat have become canals, or have dried up, smothered by weeds.

Somewhere in this mess of different threats is the key to protecting kakī in the wild, and thus an escape from this life raft. But what is it?

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Mischler says.

Visitors from the Far North

It has been said that winter does not reach the Far North. On a warm, sunny day in July 2021, there was no evidence to the contrary as construction began on a solar farm near Pukenui.

The developer, Far North Solar Farm (FNSF), had invited then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to turn the first sod. She agreed.

The excitement is clear in video footage from the day; Ardern is wielding a shovel in front of flashing cameras, standing next to a lanky Australian man in his early 30s, flashing a grin beneath a mop of blond hair.

Richard Homewood co-founded FNSF in 2019 with John Telfer, a fellow Australian. It has since become New Zealand’s most prominent solar farming company. It has 11 projects in the works, likely costing billions of dollars. Some are being co-developed with German investment giant Aquila Capital.

It is a significant portfolio from an obscure company with an unusual business history. Homewood led the expansion into New Zealand of one of Telfer’s companies, using the name Supercharged Energy.

The company’s business model was simple. Supercharged Energy would supply rooftop solar panels at no upfront cost, which the customer would pay off with long-term electricity contracts.

Despite the appealing offer, the company soon drew complaints. Some customers said the promised savings were overstated; others said claims on the company’s website were misleading. Some found it difficult to reach Homewood to resolve their problems.

In 2021, the company was featured on the consumer affairs programme Fair Go. “He was a good salesman,” one aggrieved customer said, referring to Homewood. “That’s how I signed up. That was the last of him I saw.”

A few months later, Fair Go broadcast a follow-up, with more complaints: “They’re robbing the community blind,” one customer said.

The Commerce Commission in 2020 had issued a formal warning to the company about unsubstantiated claims on its website. The Sustainable Energy Association, of which Supercharged Energy was not a member, implied the company was disreputable.

These weren’t Supercharged Energy’s only problems. Two creditors separately tried to have it liquidated over unpaid debts. Lines company Orion cancelled a contract citing “repeated payment failure and payment default”. A Disputes Tribunal ordered the company to pay $21,000 to two of its customers.

Supercharged Energy ultimately changed its name and withdrew from the retail electricity business, ending trading in 2021. By then, Homewood and Telfer had redirected their efforts into FNSF.

The Press asked the company whether it could be trusted, given it shares the same directors and some of the same employees as Supercharged Energy.

A company spokesperson, Greg Hay, said the problems with Supercharged Energy arose from unexpectedly poor market conditions. Due to an unforeseen spike in wholesale electricity prices, the company had contracts to sell power “considerably below” the cost of buying it.

“Many other small, independent electricity retailers went out of business at this time,” Hay said.

“Operating as an electricity retailer became untenable for anyone not actually generating… It was [this] realisation … which drove the move to become a utility-scale developer, which is what Far North Solar Farm is now.”

In retrospect, Hay said, the company should not have replicated its Australian business model of outsourcing panel installation and customer communications to local contractors.

“We recognise now that this wasn’t fit for purpose in a new market like New Zealand and, in doing so, there were a small number of customers who were let down.”

FNSF had built numerous positive relationships with outside groups since 2019, Hay added. It had secured five resource consents and entered a partnership with Aquila Capital that included a rigorous vetting process.

With Supercharged Energy in the past, Homewood and Telfer are looking to the future. And one of their many projects rises above the rest, on a jagged terrace between two rivers in Te Manahuna, New Zealand’s electricity engine room.

A gold rush

The scale of ‘The Point’ is difficult to comprehend.

It is expected to cost around $600m. With around 740,000 solar panels it would cover an area nearly the size of nearby Twizel.

It would come with an 89ha ecological restoration, meant to return some of Te Manahuna’s lost biodiversity to the site, which is currently depleted farmland used for wintering cows.

It would be New Zealand’s largest solar farm. And it wouldn’t be alone.

The Press understands at least eight solar farms have been proposed in Te Manahuna. FNSF has proposed another one near Lake Ōhau, which would be the fourth largest in the country. A solar farm proposed by Lodestone Energy almost adjacent to The Point would be the fifth largest.

Nearby land is understood to have been leased by Todd Energy, which is considering its own solar project.

If all are built as planned, millions of solar panels would carpet theTe Manahuna landscape. Much of it would cover rare glacial outwash plains, in what the Environment Court deemed an “Outstanding Natural Landscape”, meaning it has local or national significance.

This wave of solar farms has come as a shock to environmentalists, who for more than a decade have been fighting irrigated dairy farming in Te Manahuna. They finally had success — recent rules effectively ban future dairy conversions in the area — only to find solar farms slipping in through a side door.

“In the past, there was a big stoush over dairy farm development,” Nicky Snoyink, regional manager for Forest & Bird, says.

“We really felt like we’d come a long way, only now to be faced with this new gold rush.”

The looming battle over solar farms has an added dimension. Many environmental debates are zero-sum: the environment wins, or it loses. Here, the answer is murkier.

New Zealand faces rising electricity demand alongside commitments to decarbonise the economy. That requires building renewable energy infrastructure like solar farms quickly and at scale.

On paper, Te Manahuna is the perfect place to start. According to the Global Solar Atlas, it has the best solar potential in New Zealand, better even than the sunny Far North. Recent rules limiting dairy farm expansion have made undeveloped land cheaper. Much of the required electricity infrastructure already runs through it.

If development can’t occur in flat, sunny locations close to existing infrastructure, then the investment needed to create new renewable energy won’t happen, says FNSF’s Hay. Instead New Zealand will need to keep burning fossil fuels to meet growing energy demands.

“Every region of New Zealand needs to contribute to help achieve our national climate change goals, not just want the work to be done somewhere else.”

The counterpoint is that Te Manahuna is a fragile environment, which has already absorbed much of the nation’s renewable energy growth. Adding millions of solar panels will add further pressure on the whenua and the awa.

“It’s death by 1000 cuts,” Snoyink says. “[Te Manahuna] has already been subjected to a lot of development, so what’s left has become even more important from a habitat and species perspective.”

We need to fight the climate crisis, she says. But we also have a biodiversity crisis: “The risk is we’re trying to solve one problem by exacerbating another.”

Walker, the ecologist, says this isn’t just any old part of the country. It is one that should be recognised for its rare values.

“They’re not making any more outwash plains,” she says.

“It’s a particular landform unique to the basin, and the extent, the intactness … it’s not going to be recreated, and that’s what would be lost.”

The lake effect

The most damning criticism has not been made publicly.

Dr Colin O’Donnell is a principal scientist at DOC, and an expert on braided river birds. Earlier this year, he wrote a 13-page internal report about The Point, eviscerating the proposal. (DOC provided O’Donnell’s report to The Press on request.)

“Given the complete uncertainty about the magnitude of effects … allowing a solar farm like this to go ahead would be potentially catastrophic to the long-term viability of [critically-threatened] species, even if small numbers are killed regularly,“ he concluded.

His comments were specific to The Point, but likely apply more broadly. The main concern is the so-called “lake effect”. From above, solar farms can look like one large, dark mass, indistinguishable from water. If a bird tries to land, they are either killed on impact, or so disoriented they are easy pickings for a predator.

Research findings on the theory are mixed. There is no dispute, however, that solar farms — like most infrastructure — can kill birds. The question is how many.

What might be an acceptable risk elsewhere takes on greater significance in Te Manahuna. There are 34 native bird species in the general vicinity of the solar farms, 18 of which are threatened or at-risk. Three of them are nationally critical ‒ kōtuku, matuku hūrepo and kāki.

“If collisions occur, as they have in similar species overseas, this could have a significant impact on their small, vulnerable populations,” O’Donnell’s report said.

The presence of kakī significantly raises the stakes. They are highly likely to cross the site where The Point will go, O’Donnell said. Its outer boundary is 6km from the captive programme. “[I]f collisions occur, this would have a significant impact on population viability,” his report concluded.

While the report has not been publicly released, it was provided to FNSF. DOC has been working with the company on its ecological restoration plans.

In response, FNSF commissioned a peer review from an independent ecologist, which was also provided to The Press. It concluded O’Donnell’s report “overstated” the risks to birds and relied on overseas examples that did not necessarily translate to a New Zealand context.

The threat of bird collisions at The Point was minor, it said, although it acknowledged it “does pose some risk to threatened and at-risk birds in the vicinity”.

(A DOC spokesperson said the agency did not believe O’Donnell’s report was overstated: It was “a carefully researched paper on potential risks”.)

FNSF said it would nevertheless take action to better prevent any risks to birds.

It would extend its planned predator control outside the solar farm, to the adjoining braided river delta. The rows of solar panels would be separated with 4m gaps, which would mitigate the lake effect. It would explore other measures such as using non-reflective panels.

And in its discussions with DOC, another idea emerged. A damaged aviary at the kakī facility had yet to be replaced, and was recently condemned. Could the company help fund one, as a way to mitigate the impact of the solar farm? Discussions are in early stages but are understood to be positive.

The return

On a cold, wintry morning last month, a towering artwork was erected in front of the Southern Alps. The pou, by local artist Ross Hemara, depicts two waka holding up a Pouākai (Haast’s Eagle).

It was an important milestone for local Māori. “It’s the first real footprint that we as a hapu and an iwi have planted back on the whenua,” says Karl Russell, from Kāti Huirapa, Nō Arowhenua.

Te Manahuna is within the takiwā (area) of three of Ngai Tahu’s Papatipu Rūnaka: Arowhenua, Waihao and Moeraki.

All see Aoraki as a sacred tūpuna (ancestor); his tears fill the Waitaki River, a vital source of mahika kai (in the southern Māori dialect, ‘k’ replaces the ‘ng’ sound. Waitaki, for example, is equivalent to Waitangi).

After a long period of relative invisibility, local Māori are reclaiming space in Te Manahuna. Starting in 1848, Crown land purchases alienated Ngai Tāhu from their ancestral lands. Promised reserves for Māori were either insufficient or non-existent, and access to mahika kai was compromised.

There was no agreement to sell Te Manahuna, where local Māori and their tūpuna had sought physical and spiritual nourishment under the watchful eye of Aoraki. Much of the land was taken and developed.

Now, the journey of return has begun. Mana whenua are involved in the annual Matariki Mackenzie event and have worked with the local council on spatial and district plans. Their contribution is being recognised in the community. Yet, the whenua is not the same.

Since the alienation of their lands, the Waitaki River — which once loudly stormed through narrow gorges — now slinks between three concrete dams. The flooding of Lake Benmore buried many areas of cultural significance. Tuna (eels) are nearly non-existent; weka are gone entirely.

Now, large solar farms look set to further change the whenua. Rather than repair the damage, it may make matters worse.

“We’ve started this journey of inserting ourselves back into the whenua,” Russell says. “Are we now going to get the landscape covered in a whole lot of new materials?

“What does that say about the health and wellbeing of our people?”

There is scepticism towards these new developments. In the past, officials have come and gone, making bold claims about the benefit to Māori of new industries. Usually, none arrive.

Dardanelle McLean-Smith, chairperson of Te Rūnanga o Waihao, is not opposed to development. She wants to ensure it is carefully planned and there is benefit for local people.

“If the takiwā is going to be producing a significant amount of energy, some of the benefits should go back into the communities it's coming from,” she says.

For mana whenua, who have the longest association with the land, important questions need to be answered. How will the solar panels be recycled, given there is currently no way to do so at scale? Will the use of fast-track consenting laws mean avoiding environmental checks and balances?

“We want progress, and we want to be able to develop our takiwā in a way that is going to sustain our people for the next 50, 100, 200 years,” McLean-Smith says.

“But it has to be done in a way where it's planned, it’s partnered, and it does not leave legacy issues for our mokopuna to clean up, because that's what we're experiencing now and have done for the past 180 years.”

As kaitiaki, there is responsibility through whakapapa to care for the environment. Russell, for one, feels this deeply. He has watched new industries come into Te Manahuna and leave behind a mess for future generations. He does not want to see another.

The industrialisation of the whenua, he says, has taken and taken and taken.

'How much more does Te Manahuna have to give to the country?” he asks. “And what is the country’s payback to Te Manahuna?”

Māwhero

Inside the kakī aviaries, Liz Brown tells a love story.

Kakī don’t get names unless they are used for breeding in captivity. Two of those are Māwhero and Wiremu.

The social dynamics of kakī are peculiar, almost human-like. They theoretically mate for life, but sometimes things get complicated.

Māwhero and Wiremu spent one glorious breeding season together before the latter got sick. It was cancer. (Yes, kakī can get cancer.) He was euthanised and Māwhero was alone.

Māwhero is special. She is from a rare lineage, making her a valuable source of genetic diversity. It is why she is here, safe in captivity, rather than on the open plains of Te Manahuna. It’s important that she has a partner.

Staff were trying to find one for her when a familiar face appeared outside the aviary. A wild kāki that had been released nearly a year earlier.

Birds don’t often return to the captive centre, but this one wanted something. Staff opened the door and let him in. He paired with Māwhero. He was christened Manonui.

It turned out they’d tried to pair the two previously, but it hadn’t worked out. “They were friendly, but not romantically friendly,” Brown says. They now play an important role in keeping their species alive.

It is a sweet, simple anecdote in a complicated story about humans and our impact on the world. Most of these birds will die. But some, like Manonui, will survive long enough to help save their species.

It’s not an easy task, caring for an endangered bird, and being surrounded by so much death.

“You harden yourself to it, a wee bit,” Brown says. “In the early years of doing this job I found it quite hard. But you’ve got to look at the bigger picture. All up, we’re making progress.”