Okay, [Foreign language] , Owen Hickston, [Foreign language] . Welcome to Balmy Palmy. I'm Owen Hickston, Investor Relations Manager, and I'm just going to run through a few logistics for the day, starting with the end of the day. If you're flying out of Balmy Palmy, there will be minivans to take you to the airport from here. In terms of those in the room, bathrooms immediately beside the caffeine station and back past the main entrance you came in. Orlando Free is the Wi-Fi; there's no password. In the event of an alarm or an emergency, we are asked to vacate, evacuate to the car park. In the event of an earthquake, get under the table and get friendly. Today's a series of reasonably short, punchy sessions. There is time for questions.
If you're in the room and you have a question, can you please wait till the microphone's shoved under your nose? That'll allow our online audience to hear the question. Questions from the online audience will come through, and Phil Clark will very coherently read them out. I've highlighted a couple of key points: morning tea and lunch. Very important because there will be the Meridian Investor Day golf competition running. Orlando Country Club staff will take you through the comp, so you can either get out early and establish a clubhouse lead or spend the morning visualizing how you're going to win it. There's some tremendous Meridian merchandise up for the winners. They will no doubt be the envy of the capital market. Mike will announce the winners at the end, so welcome. Hope you enjoy the day. Please participate, and with that, I will pass it over to Mike.
[Foreign language] . Great to see everyone this morning. Thanks for those that are here that were able to make it in person, and thanks to everybody who will be no doubt glued to their PC screens for the majority of the day, given the talent that we've got coming to you. I'm Mike Roan. For those who don't know me, CEO of Meridian. I've worked at the business in a number of roles for 17 years now. I love it. I love the industry. I've spent probably longer in the industry than I've done most other things, and it's incredibly important what we try and do as a country.
You get a lot of meaning from being in the sector, and the Investor Day is a really important piece of our calendar as it allows you to hear from people within our business that are out there doing the work, actually leading. We have a great brand, and the merch is tremendous. What makes businesses successful are the people who are running it. Owen and I love talking to you. We love hearing your thoughts and questions. Again, I was saying to someone last night, it is actually very difficult to get straight feedback on the things that you do well and places where you may not be best spending your time.
We get that from these sessions, and it is really appreciated because I can tell you, and you will see it as we go through this this morning, the people that are here from within Meridian are committed to making this business as successful as we possibly can, and insight from others is always helpful. If I give a little bit of context and then just talk to the agenda for a touch and then hand it over to Rory, who is going to come up after me, if I jump back 18 months when we did our last Investor Day, I do not know if anyone remembers what we framed it as, but we framed it as certainty. That was the basic frame for the Investor Day. It was driven by two things.
It was driven by the 20-year deal that we did with Genesis Energy and the fact that we had confidence in gas as a transition fuel as the economy moved forward. That was May 2024, and no one knew what was going to unfold post that. As we sit here today, the context is obviously very, very different. You've got security, affordability. They've all got political focus and lens. I think we've dealt with the electricity security issues through the arrangements that we've already got in place, so I'm pretty comfortable and confident around the security elements as the political concern is security. We've got a massive pace of change going on within the sector and within our business to keep up with the needs of customers primarily.
have got opportunity to refine and make the business more efficient and effective at what we do, and we have got to grow the scale of our business if we are to support the economy appropriately. That is what today is about, is how do we deliver sustainable returns for people who invest their money in us, have the confidence to invest it in what we do. You will hear from people why that is a reasonable thing for folk to do and get confidence in how we are trying to drive that underlying business performance. That is the context, and the agenda follows it, really, as you are going to hear everything from, as I hand over to Rory, what we see in the future. What do we think the future looks like?
As we present the future, we talk about the things that we're doing, whether it's Murray Hill, who many of you won't know, but you're going to learn a lot about MAZ, as he has kicked off our hydro redevelopment. While gas has been a challenge, there are silver linings to these things because it makes you do things differently. We are getting back into the hydro development game, and you'll hear from Guy about our renewable development pipeline. You're going to hear from a lot of our executives. We're going to talk to how we're digitising our retail business and our generation business to improve the way that we engage with customers and drive efficiencies. Of course, near term, there's a focus on regulation, politics, and what choices we've got from a consenting perspective to actually accelerate the pipeline of assets.
It is a super full agenda. As Owen said, we're after questions, feedback, thought feedback, and thoughts on the things that you hear, but please mingle. Please take the opportunity to meet those who are doing the work. Not everybody that is in the room that's within the Meridian team will be up at the lectern, so we've got other experts that are in the room that are fundamental to the business and choices that we're making moving forward. Take the opportunity to say good day to someone if you don't know them because they're probably someone within the Meridian leadership team who's got a key role in supporting what we want to do. I'm going to close because we're here in Palmy because the Manawatu is becoming a bigger piece of our business.
We've got Te Āpiti, we've got Te Rere Hau, we're looking at a battery and solar farm. We've probably got a repowering project to do up at Te Āpiti at some point, so it's becoming a big part of our business as we look forward. I've got a little vid. I don't know. The propellers is you've got 91 turbines that produce about 100 gigs of energy every year, and the reason that this vid's awesome, I reckon, is give it a couple of years and you'll have three-bladed machines that are in there that will be producing 700 gigs or seven times the production, annualized production that these things do.
It is a little vid for those that did not get there yesterday to see what Te Rere Hau is today, what it might look like, and then give you a comparison of the size of the new turbines versus the old ones. Having done that, I will hand over to Rory. There you go. I love that last piece as that is technology in action. Those turbines were built in 2009, and you look at them compared to what is available to us today to power this economy. We are a technology business in many, many ways, and harnessing this resource that the country's got is not only a privilege, but it is bloody important for our shareholders that we do a damn good job of it and for the country so that the economy does transition and become electrified over time.
I'm going to hand it to Rory that's going to explore that a bit more.
[Foreign language] Rory Blundell [Foreign language] . Look, good morning everyone. I'm here to take you through some of the work we do on how the market might develop and a little bit on how we're reshaping the portfolio to deal with that future. Sadly, I don't have any videos like Mike, but I've got some colorful slides I hope you look forward to. For those that don't know me, I'm the GM of Strategy and Portfolio. I took this role back in June of this year. I've been with Meridian since 2020, and prior to that, I've worked in the industry both on the competitive side and more recently at the regulator since 2004.
Among other things, my group holds the company's long-term, I guess, view of how the market could develop, and we're also responsible for positioning the portfolio in the broader sense of what kind of assets we want to develop, but also our hedging activities and our long-term contracting. I was going to start off a bit like I did. I did not realize it was 18 months ago, but it is a bit of an overview of our modeling framework that we have developed. It is an in-house, I guess, replication of how we think the wholesale market will develop. It attempts to mimic what you would expect to happen in a well-functioning electricity market. By that, I mean prices over time tending to cost, security risks are reasonable, new investors are getting revenue adequacy, all that good stuff.
What I say, an all-singing, all-dancing view of how the system could develop, of course, predicting the future is always very tricky. Secondly, it is great to have these models and stuff, but you really need to feed and water them. They only work as good as the data and the information you put in. To that end, we have got a dedicated team, and their sole job is to keep these things up to date. They periodically review them. We have got a huge, I guess, team of interested parties that weigh in with their opinions as well. We do a big annual refresh every year, take the board through it, and of course, as things change, we do more regular updates. Finally, these things, they are only as useful if you do actually use them.
We feel having that central set of curated assumptions and scenarios is super valuable. It is a really good coordination exercise for the business. Some of the stuff I am going to talk to up on the screen today really kind of underpins a lot of the investment we do at Meridian. It helps form, I guess, internal views of how we should be kind of moving the company forward and helps us respond to regulatory interventions. Those are just some of the inputs and the outputs I just highlighted. I was going to step through the stuff in green a bit over the next 15 minutes or so. I will put up some charts and figures. I guess my request is do not fixate on them too much. They are just a snapshot at a point in time.
I just did want to be open and kind of give you a broad overview of some of the stuff we're seeing, some of the challenges, some of the conversations we're having internally. As they say, it's not always the answer. It's the path to getting there where you get a lot of the insights. We've got two kind of large scenarios or narratives that we kind of form a lot of things. We talk about plausible futures versus predictions per se. On the left, you've got evolution, Evo, and on the right, Revo. Clearly, we do a lot more bespoke work depending on what the problem is we're looking at, but these kind of permeate a lot of what we do. Evo, really, I'd say it's a bit more BAU. It's kind of, I'd say, a modestly changing operating environment, broadly classed as limited decarbonisation.
I think it's a future world that you would recognize based on what you know today. Revo is a bit more shiny stuff, a lot more dramatic path to decarbonization, so a lot more of dynamic future. I guess in either case, you're going out 30, 40 years. We assume that the market design kind of keeps track of what it needs to. Whether it looks like today or not, it's always trying to balance those three things that any market should be looking at: sustainability, reliability, and affordability. I would say it's probably a pretty optimistic view of the future in the sense we don't assume per se that we're going to have a structurally like the RMA is going to be like it is for the next 30 years.
You have to assume over time we will get our act together and things will be able to be built at about the right time. Kicking off with demand, this is our current house view of annual demand in gigawatt hours for generation. No matter where that generation comes from, be it rooftop solar or grid-connected generation, it is based on bottom-up views that make up the constituent parts of demand. The takeaway here is in either world, Evo or Revo, we still see significant demand growth, but it is really hard to tell what trajectory we are on. That growth follows around 15 years of stagnation. You go, "Why is it changing?" The big drivers, they come from decarbonization of industry, basically heat conversion towards electricity, EV uptake, which we are a bit slower than others, and I guess the cool new thing, which is data centers.
Based on that, you're going to need widespread investment in generation at scale to meet that growth. It is this kind of analysis that we chunk down to targets like you might have heard about the seven-in-seven target, which are Guy and Rebecca and the dev team lead. That is what is behind it. That target in particular takes us to 2030, but if you look beyond that, if New Zealand is serious about moving to a low-emissions economy, you're talking decades of growth there. It is a really tricky area to look at. Some of those big slabs of demand, they are a function of specific policy initiatives and the relative costs of electricity versus substitutes. All of that can change. Data centres present a new kind of binary kind of thing, which is also hard. This kind of area can move quickly.
I think the message, though, is I don't think we have a head in the clouds here. I don't think our numbers are out of whack with other stuff out there. If anything, I'd say we're kind of diminished to lower in the pack of where people see demand going. You go, "That's great. That's aggregate demand levels." If you kind of lift the hood, there's quite a lot happening under there, which is why it's kind of so hard to predict as such. The point I just wanted to make was what we call demand, that line on a chart, is actually made up of a hell of a lot of constituent parts.
What I called out on the previous slide, the two big movers coming from that blue and green area, which is EV uptake and industrial decarbonisation, basically, that makes up the majority of demand growth. Demand satisfied by rooftop solar is in there in that kind of pinky colour. We showed it as a negative just to really highlight it's a bit different than the other ones, but it's still in there. It's from a customer perspective. It's still demand. It's just coming from the roofs, not a power station. I think the other point worth mentioning is how that demand interacts with the market is also super important, whether it's the physical issue like batteries, vehicle-to-grid, how rooftop solar impacts, and also, but there's non-physical things.
You can do a lot with tariff design, and that can change consumption patterns, and that can have a massive bearing on the shape of what we call the residual demand curve. That is the demand left over that generators are competing to fill, basically. Long story short, I think it is not just a question of how much shows up. It is when it shows up and what kind of demand shows up and how flexible that demand is. That all kind of matters. That is all sitting behind all these kind of aggregate lines. Supply now. We spend a lot of energy trying to understand costs because if you step back, you go like New Zealand really is awash with energy potential. The issue is navigating the RMA and making sure you can get stuff connected to the grid and Transpower can build enough grid to move the electrons around.
If you kind of say, "Look, that should be cleared up," really, when you're talking about the future and understanding the supply mix, you're trying to understand to a large degree where costs are going. The chart here shows the levelised cost of electricity in real 2024 dollars for two of the main technologies, solar and wind. Levelised cost of electricity, that's the average price a plant needs to receive in order to meet Meridian's investment hurdle. Basically, those things have been trending down over time, and that's because the world is getting a lot better at making these and deploying these, and that's the so-called learning curve. You can see they were trending down until something happened around something in the mid-2020s. Due to political unrest and inflationary pressures, LCOEs have kicked up a bit of late.
You can see from the dots, we do our best to track projects and benchmark our views about the future. Some of those views are those green and yellow kind of shaded areas looking forward of where wind and solar costs could go in the future. As I said, this could all change, no doubt, but I guess wanted to leave you with the message. We still see innovation has some ability to take costs out in real terms, albeit starting, unfortunately, from a slightly higher base just because things have essentially reset at a higher level. Looking at the chart, our sense is solar costs probably have more potential to fall versus wind, perhaps a bit more commoditized. That thing can always change. I think that is why Guy Waipara is very good with this.
It's why it makes sense to hold options in both from our perspective. I would say, remember, this is just costs. Just because you've got the lowest cost plant does not mean the market's going to reward you, of course, for building that. It is an important thing to understand. Before getting to prices, I wanted to touch on these two pictures, which is Flex or Firming, which is the kind of cool new word. That's how much the market we think is going to need going forward from the shorter term on the left and the longer term on the right. Basically, charts show how much energy is being dispatched on average by various firming resources over time.
I think the important thing, no matter how we look at it, Evo, Revo, whatever scenario we look at, we just see a huge need for more firming resources going forward. That is to fill the hole, which is left by gas and thermal exit. Also, as you move into the 2030s, the challenge of just delivering reliable power year in, year out from a highly renewable system. The main chart I want to focus on was the one on the right because this gets a lot of news. That is our view on the dry year energy needs in each year going forwards. This is really hard to show, by the way. This is not perfect, but it is a good representation. The line represents how much more fuel is needed in a dry year, and the bars show how you could achieve that fuel, basically.
Bars higher than the line means you're good from a security perspective, though more is always better, basically. That underlines what Mike opened with. The line could drop over time, and the reason it does that is in our world, as you think the cost, I said we need more firming. If that's really expensive to provide, it makes sense for the market to adjust and overbuild renewables because it's just more rational. What I mean overbuild, as long as prices compensate you for doing that overbuild. What that means is if you overbuild a bit in dry year, you don't need as much extra fuel coming into the market. There's also a bit of hydro profiles changing through time and all this kind of stuff. It may not happen.
It may stay up around that kind of 2025 figure where the line is three to three and a half terawatt hours. That could, if that line does not drop. That is a good kind of rule of thumb that we use for how much kind of dry year energy, firming, flex, whatever you want to call it, the system needs. I would say in those bars, because some of you might say, "Why are they like that?" We have derated the thermal plants a bit to account for they might not always be fueled by gas as operational considerations, and the ENSIS demand response is not at full board because you cannot call it maximum every year. You could argue there is a bit more slopping around on the supply side. I think standing back, I am kind of happy with what the story, the chart is trying to tell us.
For me, it paints a picture where we're okay from a security perspective, but I think the country would benefit from what we'd call more deep storage, basically. While we think the demand response agreement with Enzius, massively positive, really good, getting more reliable access to hydro resources, be it in the short term from contingent storage or longer term from potential hydro development, which Murray's going to talk about, I think would be hugely beneficial. It would just add to those bars, give us a lot more of a buffer, basically. Onto prices. You put all that stuff I just spoke about into our world, into our modeling framework, demand supply, a bunch of constraints, hit the go-mutton. It's not that simple, but those are the prices that come out. Those are average North Island prices, Evo and Revo in real NZD 2024 dollars out to 2050.
The front end, so WEMO25, that's kind of the name for our big annual refresh. I'm just looking at that blue shaded area going forward. You can see the front end, it's still dominated by, in our view, the effects of the rapid decline of the gas industry. If you look beyond that, you can see it dropping, and that's because of the renewable build. You kind of average out the humps and bumps. What you get is prices clearing around NZD120-NZD130 a megawatt hour for the next 15 years thereafter after the prices drop. I guess, because it's all in real terms, it starts trending down over that. That's just a function of those learning curves and more renewables, stuff kind of getting built at the right time and changing that balance.
To come back to that opening slide I spoke about, at those price levels, builders of plant are getting the investment hurdle, securities concerns are managed. Everything's doing what it needs to do. That is a market in equilibrium. That can work. There are other views of the future, clearly. Over time, you would think a well-designed electricity market, you should see prices trending or going towards costs over time, as long as you've got sensible supporting policies, gas in particular, and resource legislation. You go, "Why doesn't it equal just that LCOE of those charts I put up earlier?" The difference is really the cost of firming. That's essentially what's driving that delta between the two. Much like I kind of looked under the hood with demand, this is doing the same with price.
I showed you average price, and I should say that's average across all hydrologies and the kind of the spread around hydrology prices is massive, basically. This is what's going on behind the scenes. The chart on the left shows GWAP to TWAP or price participation for some select assets or technologies. That's a measure of the average price received by the plant divided by the average market price. Numbers bigger than 100% mean you've typically got a flexible asset and you're just generating at the right times, and you get a price above the average, basically.
What it shows is as you get more intermittency in the system, you get more price volatility, meaning you should see a growing divergence between the price participation of intermittent resources, which is kind of the solar and the wind there, trending down, and the more flexible resources, and particularly the Waitaki chain up top, going up. We think solar price participation will probably fall faster than wind, and solar's got a lot higher kind of correlation than wind, basically. Wind also has some variable running costs, meaning when prices get really low, it makes sense to spill wind, basically. What that does is it kind of pumps up, I guess, artificially pumps up your price participation because you're not getting your generation away at low prices. You can see that blue line on the left-hand chart.
We just took a slice through that to look at a typical day in 2036, if there is such a thing. That is the one on the right. It is just to kind of show you what a typical day could look like. You have got the price in the red and the output of kind of on average wind and solar in the green and blue. Shokhara prices kind of peak when wind and solar are not at their highest. Prices dip in the middle of the day when solar and wind are really cranking, basically. In that year, at least. That is, again, across all hydrologies, which is an average of an average, basically, but you have got to make some headway. We are not seeing prices really collapse like they have in other countries here. The reason is New Zealand has got a really good backbone of flexible hydro.
When solar's really cranking, the hydro can back down and shift water to the higher value periods. I would say overnight could get interesting. You can see a bit of price collapse overnight, and that's because we'll have a lot of must-run generation competing to generate overnight. All the geothermal, any generation with kind of low cash operating costs is all trying to squeeze in overnight. You could see some real price collapse overnight despite the amount of flex we have in hydro. Finally, I would say we don't have negative prices in our market. Prices can only go to zero. In other jurisdictions, you get negative prices where you actually have to pay to generate. You can imagine that'll change all this story again.
I think that will only add value to flexible assets if you can really shift out of the way and target the high periods. It really just, I mean, it's just a very complicated way of saying there's a lot of value in flexibility. None of this is a surprise. It should be factored. People will have their own views, but you've got to factor this at the time you make an investment decision. I think the takeaway is it's really important the market designers keep the prices adjusting to the physics and essentially the reality of the system because what that does is it makes sure investors are targeting the right investment for the system instead of just trying to put in the lowest cost plant. It's all about, it's really, it's not about an LCOE shootout.
It's who can deliver the most value to the system, basically. Now, this is Owen's looking forward to being described this, but if there is an award for slide of the day, here it is. I did mention correlation, and Mike put me up to this. The two blocks of color, yeah, I guess colorful tables, they show generation correlation for solar on the left and wind on the right. Red means high correlation, green means low correlation, yellow is somewhere in between. If you look at solar on the left, what you see is you've got rooftop solar sites starting at the south of the country. Why we put south here, I don't know, but we start at the south, and as you head down to about halfway, you're going northwards until you hit that line.
We do industrial sites as well, starting at the south, moving north. There is a lot of red there, and it is a very complicated way of saying it is noon everywhere in New Zealand at the same time, basically. All the solar is cranking at the same time, although you can see there is a little bit of diversity with the yellow colors. Wind, on the other hand, on the right, again, you have wind sites starting at the south, at the top of the country, at the top of the table, and as you go down the page, you are going north. Wind, you can see pockets, the red areas. There are pockets of regional correlation, but it is actually quite diverse nationally. I guess that is a simplish way of, I think, showing why we feel solar's price participation will probably fall faster than wind. Can I go on? Thank you. Okay.
That's enough energy modelling. You go, "That's great. How are you going to manage all this?" Managing our fuel, water preoccupies a large part of my team. One of the main instruments we manage that with is with swaptions or callable agreements, basically. They're just a really good fit for our portfolio. The lesson from the past year is gas is a whole lot worse than we, or for that matter, most people expected, and contracts that try to pass that risk through really aren't worth all that much. You can see here from this chart the volume and the makeup of our swaption book and how that's changed over time, away from gas and towards coal and demand response. In a perfect world, we're going to add more contingent storage to that as well.
The eagle-eyed among you will notice that the new Enzius demand response contract starts from 2025 on the chart. We all know we used Enzius from mid-2024. That's a bit of a faux pas. Sorry about that. We'll get it next one. I do not think it changes the story. I would say in green there, we've had a bit of success. This is seasonal stuff, not peak demand response. This is more goes to that chart I talked about earlier about really long duration flexibility. We've had some success with other retail customers providing it, but I think we found the volume's a bit more limited than we originally thought. It's a bit harder going, but there still could be some there.
The swaptions kind of, they fall towards 2028, and that kind of lines up with that price chart I showed you earlier where we feel prices with the amount of renewable build going on and a bit of resetting of things, the market should find a new equilibrium and prices easing so we do not need as much insurance. Things do not stop at 2028, by the way. I just had to cut it off somewhere. We have got the Huntley Deal out to the mid-2030s, and we have got the ENSIS demand response out to the 2040s. Just what I wanted to leave you with, I feel we have got a good amount of flexibility, particularly in the front end where we think the market could be the stressed the most, and we are still actively exploring other options.
On top of that, with the main event, longer term will be augmentation, potential augmentation of our hydro storage, which Murray's going to talk about a bit later. Finally, the other way we manage our risk position is the sales book. The CNI channel, which has been really good for us, provides another amount of swing. Managing our CNI position going forward will be particularly important, especially if Lisa and the retail team keep making inroads into the mass market segment. There is that other, and if the wholesale prices do in fact ease, like my chart suggested, because CNI tariffs are really correlated with the wholesale market and the ASX curve in particular. What this chart shows is our contracted sales position for CNI versus kind of what where 2025 is. You can see it really falls in 2027, 2028.
We have got a choice, really, how much you want to recontract in those years. If you do recontract, how much you want to kind of back to back or lay off through the ASX. All of that has got implications for our risk position and our appetite to buy more or less portfolio insurance. I think point being, combined with that swaption chart I showed you earlier, we have got lots of levers we can pull over the next few years to navigate things. I think it really shows the benefits of the integrated model and lots of diversity in the portfolio. Summing up, look, I will just leave that in the background.
I think the main thing I wanted to say was, I think that story I presented, it is all manageable, and it feels as though with the signing of the Huntley Strategic Energy Reserve, security is in a lot better shape despite the faltering gas industry. That said, I think there is a big difference between meeting security of supply requirements versus having affordable, secure electricity prices. For the latter, you are either going to have to import fuels or you are going to have to kind of unlock domestic resources. We think for a host of reasons, the better option for New Zealand is to really take another hard look at hydro. Thank you. Shall I leave that there? Questions? Yes, ma'am. I sat with Neville at dinner last night, so I thought we got through this way.
All right. Andrew here has got the microphone at the moment.
A couple of questions, if I may, to begin. First of all, how do you think about the LCOEs that you had up before, which declined? How do you think about the, I guess, you build out the best sites first and the fact that when you think about this sort of the generation stack over time, you build cheap sites first and more expensive sites later. Is that built into that chart at all or not?
Yeah, yeah. I think it primarily shows how the, if you're talking about the green and the yellow areas going forward, I think that's more just about what we feel that the inherent technology costs will do over time as opposed to, they're probably using probably just average site stuff like what a reasonably good site will produce as opposed to going through specific sites to develop that curve.
When we build up the price, all that stuff, that's at the front end that uses specific sites of known projects and announced things. As you get further out, we're having to make a guess kind of thing. We do apply a merit order.
Okay. I guess in terms of the next slide, I think it was, which then showed the one after, actually, that one there. That then includes your view, I guess, of sort of the generation.
Correct. Yep. The build order. Yeah. As I said, we've got this team, they're going through all the announcements, reading some of your analyst reports as well, and it's working out what people have said, what we think they can actually do, a level of pragmatism.
As you go in the back, that is where I said we have to, you have got a choice about how much optimism you apply there. We kind of think that, again, it is a feedback thing. If prices are too high in our model, we add more generation as long as it is getting revenue adequacy. We think you are not adding so much generation like the whole country is out there building wind farms kind of stuff. We just keep iterating until we feel we have got a reasonable solution of the build run rate, prices, investor returns, security. That is where it is a bit more of an art than a science, so to speak.
My second question just relates to overbuild risk, and that is a topic that comes up from time to time.
How will we know that when we get into a situation where we may have a bit of overbuild is, I guess, good overbuild in terms of providing additional security of supply versus overbuild, which suppresses wholesale prices for a period of time and we end up in the 2010s again?
How will we know? I think it probably depends a bit on that demand curve to some degree. I think we should be able to see some of that coming. We have the option. I'm not suggesting it, Guy, but you can, if we see the overbuild coming, that will feed into our price forecasts. The projects that we thought were economic will become uneconomic, and you can throttle back the generation. There is that aspect to it.
I think the trouble which might have been in the past is if there is a real big bow wave of investment and then you just see some, the demand just does not show up like anyone suggested. Yeah, I guess that is a risk. We have got bunches of people looking at this, and I think we have all got lots of projects in various states, and you can do things with pushing them back and all that. You can juggle things quite a lot.
Hi, Murray. Thank you for the invitation. Just a quick one. On slide 14, if you mind going there. On the GWAP/TWAP chart, are you able to talk to what the whole business is sort of expecting from portfolio level in 2020 or FY2036? You talked to hydro increasing potentially. Obviously, you have got an in-house wind path as well.
Just wondering what, on a portfolio level, you see GWAP/TWAP being?
Oh, I don't know. It must be dominated by, from a generation portfolio? Yeah. Yeah. It must be dominated, I mean, in those years by Manapouri and Waitaki. I don't know off the top of my head, but it'd be something approximating. I would have thought, I'd just be guessing, but it'd be around 110, kind of 115, yeah, if I look at the Waitaki as a proxy. It's just so much volume, basically.
Yeah. About 5-10% above where you're historically sitting in terms of relative pricing. Lift is fair?
You got it. I don't have that info. Yeah, I mean, if I look at that, if you look at Waitaki, it's a bit of a proxy for the portfolio, right? We just see it increasing.
As soon as you add more intermittency, that just kind of has to trend upwards. I should say that's across all hydrologies. Now, people who do this, it's like we've got 90 hydrology sequences in history. You've got dry years, you've got wet years, and there's no such thing as an average year. Yeah, it'll be very noisy to know, to really say, "Oh, we're on that path," so to speak.
Okay. Just a second quick one if I have time. In terms of volatility between seasons, you sort of talked to kind of dry years and wet years. You're able to talk to how the portfolio is positioned between summers and winters and how you see sort of wholesale prices fluctuate between those?
Yeah, the seasonal stuff. Yeah.
It's a good question because these dry years, they can be like dry quarters, so to speak, which is why the swaption, the portfolio, the callability is quite important. We're doing a bit of work, I guess, fundamentally, you kind of with the climate change, what's happening with our inflows. I don't think we've seen any evidence at the moment that we're getting more seasonal volatility, though we are kind of peeking into that a bit more. It's a hard one to know. I would just say, just anecdotally, it's just depending on the level of firming that shows up, it's just getting more volatile, basically. I would just anecdotally say there should be more spread between the seasons. I'm not talking into the microphone. It's just things are getting more amplified, basically. Owen's shutting me down, but Neville, make it a quick one. Sorry.
One quick one. Okay. Just the headline one then. What is roughly over the next 10 years the mix? Gigawatt-hour kind of mix of solar versus wind you expect to be built in this profile?
I just do not have that at my fingertips. Sorry. Yeah. I think I would say, I do not know, maybe when Guy chats, he can talk to this, but wind is just so much more energy dense, right? I would hazard a guess that the wind and the gigawatt-hours, it is just, I think, some of the stuff that Mike said. Solar on average, what, 20% capacity factor. You have got to build a hell of a lot of solar to kind of get to where wind levels are. Wind is just really big. When you see some of the options Guy is going to put up, there are some big ones in there.
Sneaking a supplemental about your gas assumptions over the next 5, 10 years?
They're not great. I think we've got some kind of gas experts in the crowd, but we read their reports. We're not expecting great recoveries in the gas. It's kind of managed decline or rapid decline. I'm going to have to leave it there. Thank you all. Introduce Lisa, our Chief of Retail, coming up.
Right. [Foreign language] Lisa [Foreign language] . Good morning, everybody. For those of you that I didn't meet last night, and for those people online, I'm Meridian's Chief Customer Officer, and I am based in Ōtautahi. It is a real privilege to be here today. When we met 18 months ago with some of you, we set out the new path we are on with our retail business.
That was all about adapting, thriving, and staying really resilient in our rapidly changing energy landscape. Today, I'm really excited to let you know how we are progressing there. Retail's mission is really simple, but we think powerful. That is to deliver cleaner and cheaper energy for New Zealanders. Today, we're giving an update on how we're contributing to that. That is by growing our retail business in new ways that create value from the energy system and, crucially, passing that value on to our customers. Our strategy is based around five pillars, and they are not just sort of things we made up on a strategy day. They are the things that drive everything that we choose to do.
That is our digital and data-driven customer experiences, making flex valuable for customers, electrifying transport and heat, optimizing our cost and efficiency, and increasing community good. I'm going to walk you through the progress that we've made on each of those and the stories about how we're really making a difference. Firstly, Meridian's digital transformation isn't actually just about new technology. It's changing how we work, how we serve our customers, and how we're using data to really drive innovation. Our NZD 30 million next-generation retail program is really a game changer, we think. We've moved from siloed teams and legacy systems to a much more agile, cross-functional way of working and a really modern and modular technology stack. We've chosen Kraken as our new billing engine, and the migration from Flux is well underway, and we are on track and on budget.
It's been just less than six months since we signed our agreement with Kraken. As of this morning, as I had to double-check, we've migrated 34,000 customers. We're migrating a couple of times a week, so we'll have more customers going later this week. That's going really well. Those customers will be the first to have access to our new mobile and web apps, which are built to iterate and really evolve as we introduce those new products and experiences. Underneath the hood of that, our new data, our new retail data environment is really tying together all of those things, creating one view for our customers and our business. It's enabling us to leverage AI for both customer-facing improvements, but also, and importantly, internal efficiency gains. What does that actually mean for our customers? It means faster service. It means smarter products.
It means a much more seamless experience. That is whether they're online, if they're calling us, or using our app. For our people, what it means is we've spent time, we've got more time to spend solving and building new products and less time wrestling with those old systems. We think we're building a business that's fit for the future. Now on to flexibility. We're scaling our first mass-market flex product. We call it the Smart Hot Water Plan. That is really about helping customers use energy when it's cleaner and cheaper and rewarding them for that. Since launch, we've credited NZD 880,000 back to customers, and we've shifted 2,500 megawatts out of those peak periods. Every month, we're moving hundreds of megawatt-hours out of those peaks. That means customers can save on network and energy costs.
What it means for us is we're learning really fast how to do that and where the value lies. People often ask me whether a NZD10 monthly payment is really good value. I think for retail customers, it absolutely is. They're getting NZD120 a year in the pocket. They've got no disruption to their hot water, and there's no required effort from them to do that. For us, it's really about a move in the right direction. It shows us how we can find that value, how we can pass it on to customers. We'll keep scaling and learning and sharing in those benefits. It's not really about running experiments. What we're really doing is building the infrastructure and the data systems so that we can make Flux a core offering for retail, but also for our wider business.
The next one is around transport and heat. They still remain really massive opportunities for us. Today, I'll talk about electrifying transport. Our ambition is really clear. We want to build New Zealand's largest and most loved EV charging network by 2028. So far, we've deployed 396 charge points nationwide with around 1,100 weekly charging sessions. This year, we have a further 194 charge point agreements with landowners. Of those, 118 are currently in the under-construction category. We're really focused on DC charging, making long journeys possible and making charging simple and reliable. By 2030, we expect our Zero Network to generate NZD 20 million of annual revenue. That's based on the assumption that the share of pure EVs in the light vehicle fleet will grow from around 2% today to approximately 10% by 2030.
That'll see an increase from around 90,000 vehicles to around 500,000. Those numbers do sound quite ambitious. They do come from really reputable public and private sources. As we know, it's really hard to be very accurate around the focus around new technology. We know that there's been some political change that has derailed some of that growth, but we're confident that in the long run, it will come back. That revenue stream is really backed by Meridian becoming the dominant player in the rapid and ultra-rapid public charging market. We've currently got a market share of less than 1%, and we're aiming to get to over 20%. Turning to the customer, you need to have a very good customer experience to win in this space. We're constantly improving that experience with better apps, better payment options, and hardware.
I guess that our charging product is really one of those examples of how we're extending our core competency in energy to create that additional product, or if you like, it's our form of bundling. We're leveraging our existing service infrastructure, our in-house asset deployment team, and our core retail technology to drive that. We think it'll be a really low-cost new product for us. This isn't just about infrastructure, though. We're very committed to accelerating New Zealand's transition to a cleaner and, in the long run, cheaper energy source. Cost and efficiency. Retail has executed on a very clear growth strategy since 2018. Our customer numbers have grown by over 160,000 over that period. This, along with our C&I growth, has seen retail's annual sales volumes increase over 70% during that time. This calendar year alone, retail has grown by 70,000 customers.
Half of that is organic, and the other half is a result of the Flux transaction and subsequent migration. Powershop has the most significant growth, but we're really pleased that we've also been able to grow the Meridian brand. This hasn't been at the expense of value, and that's evidenced by the 63% increase in our net back growth. While serving a much larger customer base, we've also successfully reduced our cost to serve on both an absolute and relative basis. That cost reduction has largely been driven by a reduced headcount, but also on the optimization of spend on acquisition and retention of our customers. In recent years, we've really built up a strong data and digital capability in the retail business, and that's enabled us to be much more effective using data to acquire and retain customers.
has really helped us in making more effective decision-making and reduced our reliance on costly third parties to optimize processes and build those experiences and products. We have created real efficiencies by bringing our two retail brands together at the back end, operating like a true multi-brand retailer through our whole business. The net result is that we have demonstrated that we have got the ability to scale our business without the corresponding increase in costs. It is very important for us to be a leader in the industry. Increasing community good is really critical. As we grow, we are determined to support our customers and the communities and the climate. In fact, we think that that is our license to operate. Two programs that we have seen really tangible outcomes from are our Energy Wellbeing Program and our Community and Business Decal Fund.
In our Energy Wellbeing Program, we've helped over 3,000 households since inception, and with just nearly 2,000, we've assisted just over the last year. How we run that program is that we work directly with community energy partners right across New Zealand to provide in-home energy assessments and interventions that are providing long-term sustainable solutions for energy usage and efficiency with an aim to reduce energy costs. The second thing is our Decal Fund, which is powered by the net revenue from our certified renewable energy product. That means that every certified customer is helping make that possible, which we're really thankful for. This year alone, we've supported 37 community groups across New Zealand, and we've invested NZD 1.8 million in helping them further decarbonize and put more of their resources back into the communities that they're serving.
Since we started that, NZD4.7 million has been invested in 80 different community projects, helping them to cut costs and emissions. We are incredibly proud of what we have been creating. Since 2023, we have shared those stories through our annual certified impact and transparency report that has highlighted the difference the fund is making for people and communities around the country. That is my story. I would be happy to take any questions.
Thanks. Thanks very much. Probably ties in a little bit with Rory's presentation before as well. Can you just run through why now is the time to focus on up-waiting retail and think about down-waiting C&I?
I do not think we are doing it today, but what we are trying to do is maintain the flexibility we have to make that call when the time is right.
The beauty of having a book that is spread between C&I and mass market is that we're able to manage that very regularly. As contracts come up, we can make that call. What we know is it's easy to shrink your C&I book, but it's really hard to grow your mass market book. We have made a decision as a business that we want to be consistent, and we're just growing as the time is right. That is working for us. We are certainly not jumping out of C&I overnight. We will make those decisions as we get the signals from the market about when the time is right.
Thanks. Second question, just on the migration of customer cohorts to Kraken, can you just run through what the staging of that actually looks like? You're at 34,000 customers now. I think you've got, call it, 400,000.
453.
To go. Just an overview of the staging of that would be helpful. You obviously cannot do it all at once. Why is that the case?
We have chosen to do it in a really iterative way. How the migration for Kraken works is that we do customer cohorts. We build out the product for that particular cohort, and then we learn from that, and then we do the next one and so forth. The general plan is that we will have all of mass market done by February. We have moved our first Powershop customer in today in test. Our very ambitious goal is to have the program completed by June next year. We are doing C&I. We are building the C&I component now, but that C&I migration will start in April.
Thanks, Lisa. Just a quick question on EVs.
Obviously, a pretty core part of the strategy moving forward. Just wondering if you can talk to a bit of the economics behind charging stations. Sort of what's the average cost to build a charge point and maybe a bit about the utilization as well, please?
Yeah. It depends. Every site is different. Every site has different requirements, but it ranges from, say, NZD70,000-NZD150,000, I would say, per site. We have a utilization hurdle dependent on the site. It starts around 3%-5% in year one, and then we're rising up to 20% by year 20. It is a 20-year payback.
Thanks.
Ready? Go to morning tea early, Owen. Okay.
Thanks, Lisa. Cool. Camping over there. We'll get you outside for some fresh air ideally. Morning tea will come to you at the end of the day.
Hey, welcome back.
I'm Jason Woolley [Foreign language] . I'm the General Counsel and Company Secretary of Meridian, and I also have responsibility for regulation, which means I get to present the highlight presentation of the day on regulation that I know everyone will have been looking forward to. The electricity sector is pretty heavily regulated. It's part of what we do. We're used to it. It is kind of our bread and butter. In my kind of what feels to me a relatively short time in the sector of 14 years, electricity is, if anything, just become more and more fundamental to everything we do in our lives. That means it has and always will be a focus for politicians. With appropriate acknowledgements to Forsyth Barr, from whom we borrowed liberally, there is a summary of some important electricity sector reviews since 2000.
I could probably name a few others that sort of loom pretty large to us working in the industry, but those are the key ones. You can see, even focusing on the key ones, there's quite a few. They seem to show up every couple of years or so. Certainly, when you get a change from one stripe of government to the other, you typically get a review into the energy system. Winter 2024 obviously prompted the most recent one of these reviews. As the slide says, we've been here before. The results of the reviews, almost uniformly over the years, have tended to confirm that the broad structure and design of our market is a pretty good one. The New Zealand electricity sector does work in the interests of consumers.
The review of winter 2024, and I'm referring here to the Electricity Authority's review of 2024, found that high prices reflected scarcity and were driven by fuel shortages. Nevertheless, we got the Frontier review. That was a pretty—when you looked at the terms of reference, that was an enormously wide-ranging review of the sector and whether it was working in the interests of the country. Frontier was supported by Concept Consulting, who did the modeling for their work. Their work was peer-reviewed by a group of four academics and another separate international economic consultancy, NIRA, from the U.K. They completed that report of the first four months of this year. The government took some months working out what it was going to do with it and what their response was going to be and the initiatives they're going to take off the back of it.
One October, they released it. I think it's worth highlighting and dwelling on some of the points that they found. There were some areas for improvement, but they made important conclusions in three areas, essentially saying the sector is doing well and working in the interests of consumers in the country. First, they said the fundamental design of the market is sound. There's no need for structural reform. They noted while uncertainty around demand supply and, in particular, government policy, regulatory policy had influenced investment in recent years, a strong pipeline of new generation was now being built by both generator retailers and independent generators in the sector. The review concluded that New Zealand's energy-only market design was working well and should be preserved. In fact, they said the core problem was the impact on investment from government policy volatility.
Frontier said that as this was a problem caused by the government, it required a government solution as there was no means for the private sector to address it. The second main finding was that competition in both the wholesale and retail markets was strong, with multiple large and small players and concentration rates well below internationally recognized thresholds. Having four vertically integrated entities of a similar size was seen by them as a positive indicator of effective competition, as well as evidence of substantial new entry in the market on both the retail and supply side. Frontier concluded that recent market outcomes have been the result of a lack of investment in firm capacity driven by the aforementioned uncertainty in terms of government policy rather than any indication of anti-competitive behavior of some kind. Thirdly, the review was clear about the benefits of vertically integrated electricity companies.
It noted that this structure increases operating efficiency and that in a competitive market, these benefits are passed on to consumers as lower prices. Frontier found that any claims of a market squeeze were simply not credible. In fact, their analysis indicated that across the years where data was available, independent retailers were achieving higher margins than the gentailers. They found that in a demonstration of the price smoothing benefits that firms like Meridian could bring, they concluded that rather than misusing market power, the gentailers were likely acting to protect residential customers from some of the volatility in pricing in the market at the expense of their own margins. They were quite critical of the Energy Competition Task Force's level playing field proposals.
That's an initiative of the Electricity Authority and the Commerce Commission, which I'll talk about in a second, noting that rather than resolving any underlying issues, those measures would only impose higher electricity costs onto consumers in the industry. The peer reviewers supported the Frontier conclusions. They found there was not any evidence that the market was not addressing dry year risk. To the extent there was a dry year issue, they said it was more about prices than reliability, so affordability rather than whether the lights would stay on. They recommended interventions targeted at the gas sector. Now, the public debate has quickly moved on from those conclusions and from the Frontier report. I think a lot of people pushing for reform of the sector were left underwhelmed. They are pretty strong findings.
As I indicated on the first slide, they're kind of consistent with the findings from numerous reviews over the years, which have reached broadly the same conclusions. These are the government's proposed actions off the back of the frontier report. Meridian supports—I think there are 10 on there. Meridian supports them all. There are a couple where we're saying our position is neutrality. One, an LNG facility. I think we've got an issue. I think much remains to be seen about whether that is going to be the least cost way of addressing dry year issues to the extent we need more to address that or at least to address affordability during dry years.
I think we've got a concern that once you establish an LNG import facility, you need to try and do that in such a way you're not permanently joining New Zealand gas prices and also electricity prices, energy prices more generally to world LNG prices. Query whether the LNG proposal that is currently being progressed can find a way to do that. The other one where we're neutral is Action 2.5, which is about strengthening the dry year regulatory risk framework. There is very little detail on what this means. We know there are going to be some tweaks to the way Transpower does its forecasting in respect of dry years.
You're starting to see some indications of what they might be with a greater focus, not just on what people's actual thermal capacity is, but to the extent to which they've contracted gas or other forms of thermal fuel to support that capacity. We would broadly support that or strongly support that. What more there is in mind is something that's being worked on held closely by the government at the moment. We know that there's a targeted consultation of the sector on that issue coming up, but we have not at this stage heard anything.
In relation to the dry year risk framework more generally, we would say that when you look at the combination of Meridian's demand response agreement with Enzius, the Huntley Strategic Energy Reserve agreed between us and the other gentailers and provided better access to contingent storage or actual viable, feasible access to contingent storage can be secured in some way. Coupled with the amount of new generation that is going to come online in the next couple of years, we think we are a long way towards better managing dry risk and better managing it at more affordable levels. I think we would caution that further interventions need to avoid imposing additional costs on consumers unnecessarily and/or crowding out private sector investment. I adverted to this previously.
The next slide is about the level playing field proposals pursued by the Electricity Authority and the Commerce Commission, and in particular, the non-discrimination measures which are currently on the table and moving towards implementation around middle of next year. The idea of these is to address perceived competition issues between generator retailers and independent retailers and, in particular, give the independent retailers a leg up to enable them to better compete, notwithstanding they've chosen not to own generation. There's a current set of refined proposals that the Electricity Authority is currently consulting on. Essentially, these principles would require that the gen tailors, the four large gen tailors, do not discriminate in our dealings with independent retailers between them or against them and in favor of our own internal business unit, our own retail business unit. We would maintain that that is already the case.
As I said, the authority has got a more refined proposal on the table at the moment, and it is definitely an improvement on where they were. I think there remains some risk of unintended consequences even with the proposal as currently set forth and proposed by the Electricity Authority. In particular, they have this proposal relating to what is being called a retail price consistency assessment that will compare the prices at which we sell hedge contracts to independents and other third parties and the level of our own retail pricing in particular segments of the market and under different brands. The risk with that is it may end up forcing the generator retailers to increase retail prices to the extent the authority believes the current margins being achieved on the retail sides of our business are insufficient.
There's a lot of detail in the detail still to be worked out, and further consultation will take place over the first half of next year. We'll have to see where it ends. I think the slide says it will come in midway through next year. It will cost us some money in terms of implementing that. There's quite a lot of process to be observed, and we'll just have to see how that goes. Another major sort of regulatory initiative or issue that we're pursuing, and as I indicated earlier, we think it can make a massive contribution to our ability to deal with dry year risk in an affordable manner, is to better enable or actually enable, I would say, access to contingent storage.
Contingent storage is the 832, I believe is the number, gigawatt hours of storage spread across three South Island hydro lakes, Tekapo, Pukaki, and Tekapo. You can see each of them illustrated at the top of the slide there with the relative amounts they hold. There are two colors on the Pukaki slide because the dark blue is water that becomes available when Transpower deems there to be a 4% risk of supply shortages. Still very conservative, a 96% chance of no shortages, but 4% chance of shortages. You get access to up to 220 gigs at Tekapo, at certain times of the year, 331 at Pukaki, and 67 at Tekapo. At the 10% risk curve, i.e., 10% risk of shortages, access is enabled to a further 214 gigs at Pukaki.
What we're talking about there is water that currently sits between 500 in terms of Lake Pukaki, water that sits between 518 meters and 513 meters above mean sea level. It's water we can generate from. To contextualize what we're talking about in terms of the impact on those lakes, Pukaki has been raised by 46 meters from its natural level. So between 518 and 513 is a difference between 46 meters and 41 meters above its natural level. We think the environmental impacts of that can be managed. Our suggestion is we should be able to use that water to generate through the Waitaki scheme as we do the water above 518 meters. Transpower has released what is sort of a fairly positive proposal.
They proposed to increase to some extent the buffers, which is shown on that graph there to push up the point at which access is granted. Their currently proposed buffers are probably insufficient to give us the confidence we need to change in any substantial way the way we generate and use more of the range in Pukaki. i.e., there's still a risk in our view that when access to contingent storage is really needed, it will not be available. We are pushing them to go further, and we will have to wait and see how that turns out separately by way of a completely different process. The way this works is the relevant restrictions are contained in our resource consents. Our resource consents say we can only go below 518 when Transpower says you're at the 4% risk curve. There are two ways to attack this.
One is to push Transpower to properly model the 4% risk curve, we would say, and to draw it at the appropriate place. If that's done, we can get access that way. The other way is to have the consent conditions actually removed from our consents. We are pursuing that route as well via the fast track. Humphrey is going to talk later about the fast track process. That would be for the next three years, temporary removal of the constraints on contingent storage while the market moves through to a point where a number of the projects that are currently being built come online and there is less tightness in the supply-demand balance, if you like. That's all I was going to say on that. This is my last slide.
Obviously, as we look ahead to the election next year, it feels like electricity is going to remain in the spotlight for no other reason than as a reasonably chunky component of the cost of living that everyone faces. To the extent we are looking at a cost of living election next year, electricity will remain a part of that. New Zealand First have signaled that they will go to the 2026 election on a platform of renationalization and vertical separation of generation and retail. At the other end of the political spectrum, the ACT parties want to see a further sell down of the power companies, greater use of thermal plants, and even removing barriers to nuclear generation. A number of the other parties, we are still waiting for details of their proposed policies.
The balance of perspectives and what exactly is going to win out in any future coalition party or coalition government remains uncertain. At this stage, as we look ahead to winter 2026, the outlook, as we've illustrated on the right there, is currently looking pretty positive. Continued operation of the third Huntley unit, the full coal stockpile they currently have sitting there, and currently pretty healthy lake levels means, as we sit here right now, the system operator is looking pretty low risk for the next wee while. Obviously, a lot will depend on rainfall or lack thereof in the first half of next year. Another important factor is Meridian gets access to our larger demand response options. We've been on a stand-down period with Genesis.
We have not been able to call those for some time, but those come back online, I think, in April or May next year. To the extent there is tightness, those large options are available to us. An important factor that will keep the sector in the spotlight, if you like, in relation to cost of living is there are another four years of regulated price increases to come, sort of 3.5%-4% on average, I think, just from the regulated side of things, even if we impose no price increases on our own. You add that up, and cumulatively, it is a chunky amount to come.
This means me and my team have a lot to do in continuing to engage with regulatory political stakeholders right across the spectrum and try and ensure they have the facts they need to make good decisions and that they are appropriately focused on the long-term interests of consumers. I think that's all I was going to say. Has anyone got any questions? If anyone is going to ask me about what was that? Enable the mom companies to raise equity with the expectation these companies seek out and bring forward opportunities for a new generation. I'm just going to punt for touch and hand that over to Mike. Maybe I head that one off right now. Yes.
I'll just run a quick question. The Electricity Authority gave an estimate of NZD 2.2 million.
This is the levelised playing field cost, yeah, 2.2 in the first year and 0.9 thereafter. Has Meridian done their own internal estimates of what the costs might be?
We haven't. I have to say, looking at that, that feels possibly a little strong, but they know more than us, and they're going to consult with us further in the next wee while. This will be a significant reform. Those numbers don't look crazy to me, but we haven't done the work, and we won't until we get a better handle on exactly what they have in mind. There is a lot of detail still to be worked through.
Thanks for the presentation. Just a quick one on the contingent hydro slide. Yeah, consumer benefit of NZD527 million each year. Just wondering sort of what makes up that bucket.
Any sort of big components you can break down in that?
I do not know that I can. Rory might be able to talk more to the modelling, but essentially, we have got a range. The maximum, the top of Lake Pukaki is, I think, 532 meters. I am going to get these numbers something wrong. 532 meters, 533. The bottom is 518. We are very cautious. We do not ever want to, so the bottom before you hit contingent storage is 518. We are very cautious. We do not want to be pushing against that 518 limit and find that access is not available and we cannot generate. That gives us a real problem. If you look at Meridian's corporate history, we have always generally stayed above 520.
We've left a margin there to make sure that, as I say, there is generation there and we can keep generating right through any dry period, even as things look increasingly kind of dire and tight. If we are confident that we can access contingent storage, it will give us the confidence to use that full range to go from 532 right down to 518 and even perhaps below. Effectively, in a sense, the lakes are bigger and we can just generate more right through the year. We're not holding back in anticipation of a dry winter or as things become tight, if that makes sense.
Yeah, just thinking it's a pretty good story to tell of, I suppose, you're trying to get this across the line and convincing New Zealanders and regulators that it's a good idea.
Yeah, we're doing our best. We've certainly told Transpower.
We've put that NZD500 million number in front of Transpower, the Electricity Authority, all sorts of advisors, MBIE people, I think, sort of their eyes glaze over when I start to mention the number. I've bored on at them so often about it, but I totally agree. It's a massive saving for consumers. Why we're not doing it or why we haven't done it sooner is something I struggle with.
Nev. Thanks, Jason. Just a quick question on the level playing field measures. I mean, it could be quite a potentially large change to how generator retailers operate. Is there feedback going to the EA that the implementation date in mid-2026 isn't feasible?
Not at this stage. The feedback is more sort of focused on the substantive, what do they substantively propose about which we're still, there's a bit of detail to work through.
Depending on what the final form of it is, I do not have to say I do not think that is crazy. I think we could do that. We will just have to see. Is that it? Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Hi, [Foreign language] . Tan Palmer [Foreign language]. I have got the privilege of leading Meridian's awesome generation team and our outstanding portfolio of what we think is New Zealand's best generating assets. With me today is Yanosh Irani, better known as Yani, who I have recently appointed into a new role leading our initiative to digitize the generation business. He is going to talk a little bit about that with me today.
Last year, which I think was the first year that Generation stood up and talked about operations at an Investor Day, I talked a bit about our generation business transitioning from a focus on cost optimization and asset life extension, which are still really important, obviously, but to a broader strategy which included growth from our existing assets, flexibility, and innovation in our maintenance practices, all the while continuing that focus on asset health and reliability. This change was sort of driven by the rising electricity demand, the need for more dispatchable, flexible capacity as the energy landscape is evolving in New Zealand. That made it increasingly harder to get access to the assets to do the work that we need to do. We had to get clever and innovative about how we actually did that. Our hydro and wind fleet are iconic.
They're supported by very skilled teams and really robust planning. In recent years, we've completed some significant upgrades, remediation. We've ensured high availability and reliability despite challenges such as transformer failures. I don't like to say the T word too much anymore. Increased maintenance needs because the hydro assets in particular and some of our older wind farms are aging and they need more work on them. We've also brought two new assets into the business this year from my dear friend Guy and his team, Harapaki Wind Farm, which has seen exceptional availability of 99% plus most months, which is outstanding. More recently, our grid-scale battery at Ruakaka. The generation business, back in 2023, we set a clear goal. We wanted to deliver 300 megawatts of new capacity from our existing assets and return 200 megawatts of parked capacity by 2028.
That 200 megawatts of parked capacity, I think about a month later from that baseline date, Yani became 328 when we lost another Manapouri transformer. That was pretty frustrating. That strategy is sort of underpinned by those four pillars that you can see there, growth and flex. How do we focus on asset health and reliability and also grow the capacity from our assets? For a long time, the generation business was quite divided over it's one or the other. What we have done as a leadership team is really see, actually, we need both, and we need to do those things really well. Operational excellence, obviously. Part of that, which Yani will talk a bit about, is actually digitising generation and getting improved productivity out of the assets. Climate action, very important.
A lot of the half by 2030, halving our climate emissions sits with generation. People and safety, obviously, is pretty important. Our progress and performance has been pretty solid since then. Part of our transformation, which was an operating model change and sort of rethinking our practices, we have delivered 112 megawatts of new and increased capacity so far from the assets with further hydro uplifts and upgrade investments in the pipeline. The team's efforts have resulted in increased output and increased revenue at a very low capital cost, less than NZD 2 million. We achieved that 112 megawatts, which is outstanding. I very unfairly say, compared to Harapaki, which for a little few more megawatts cost NZD 450 million. You can really see the value in just really applying some good thinking and innovation to our existing assets.
Most of that work, because the reason it was low capital cost, it was just good engineering studies and reviews and changing some constraints. There have also been some further operational changes to reduce our outage days. That has delivered some real value and choice to the business. To date, the team has removed more than 200 outage days permanently from the system, which is an outstanding achievement. It has not increased the risk, and it has not compromised safety. There have been some challenges along the way. As I said, technical complexities like transformer gassing have been really irksome. They have impacted timelines on some of our projects, but they have also driven some innovation across our portfolio on other projects to sort of optimize some of the downtime, which has been fantastic. We are committed to still delivering the 300 megawatts of new and the 200 megawatts of returned by 2028.
I guess with all of that work, there's been a big cultural shift. We've invested quite a bit in our leadership capability. We've driven a real cultural shift in the business. With that and the operational gains we've achieved, we're sort of now ready to accelerate our transformation to a more fulsome digital program. Yani will talk a bit about this later, but we believe we can deliver NZD25 million-NZD45 million of value back to the business. Yani will talk a bit more about that, but that's a mix of O&M efficiency, but also increased availability. That is pretty exciting. This slide here talks a little bit about our strategic investment pipeline. Owen will talk in the next slot about capital expenditure and sort of deep dive into this a little bit more.
Every year, the generation business would probably invest about an average of NZD15 million of stay-in-business CapEx on what we call core or recurring projects. That is to achieve things around asset health, upgrading equipment, maintaining compliance and safety. Additional stay-in-business CapEx will be committed for what we call periodic or priority or lumpy projects that are very large, often multi-year, very complex. These projects occur maybe once in a decade or once every 40 or 50 years. They generally extend asset life. They improve asset reliability and performance. They strengthen seismic resilience because there is a lot of value, as you know, sitting in concrete and steel across our asset portfolio. They modernize our plant. We generally have discretion on those projects in terms of timing.
The amount that we spend has ranged from, say, NZD 10 million in FY2024 to NZD 30 million in FY2025 with an uplift this year because we have kicked off the Benmore penstock seismic strengthening, which Owen will talk about in the next section. What you see on this slide here is what we are calling our baseline view of what those periodic projects will look like over the next 10 years. Not all of them are fully costed yet, but the baseline here, and it has been for many years, is informed by good engineering practice and standards. You should generally replace your turbines at about 45 years old. What I am really excited about with our digital generation program is that it will provide us with alternative views of that baseline. What work could we push out?
What could our data tell us about asset performance and a more comprehensive view of actual time to intervention versus a conservative engineering standards type view? How might we better optimize the timing of the work to maximize revenue opportunities versus our traditional approach of avoid winter and do not have any more than 400 megawatts out and we should be all good? How do we get a lot more granular and refined about flexing and valuing where we might do work? We are going to be using data to better predict asset failure to finesse how we might time and prioritize that work. You will see there there are three kind of buckets. There is wind, hydro, and the sort of what we call civil and seismic resilience. You can see the wind one there. Obviously, Guy's team, we work very closely with.
Our focus in generation is around what we call end-of-life studies. When you sign the contract for the wind farm, it will have a certain life. Towards the end of that, we get the OEM in to do a study and say, "Right, can we get an extension?" We did it for Te Āpiti. We got 10 years out of that. That is really valuable. It is very valuable to keep running those wind farms as long as you can. We are currently undertaking those end-of-life studies for White Hill and West Wind. That will tell us how much longer beyond the date on the tin can we get out of that wind farm. I will now hand over to Yani to talk a little bit more about DigiGEN.
Tania [Foreign language] , I think Tania has already introduced me. I am Yani.
I've been at Meridian around nine and a half years and in a number of roles. The part of my job that I enjoy the most, and I get to talk to you about today, is deploying new technologies that support our people to look after our aging assets. This is a really interesting area to work in because you can deploy technologies just for the sake of them, but what we're doing here is trying to target it towards value. The first thing about this is what is the value? What is the size of the prize? When you're trying to do an assessment like this, it's pretty good to get an external perspective. Just like our retail team did last year and they told you about with their base camp program, we're in a similar sort of space with the digital generation program.
We have McKinsey Consultants, and this is their view of the size of the prize in our business and generation. The value pools that we are targeting with this program are in a few areas. The main one is a reduction in our costs and an increase in our revenue. That revenue increase, we are looking at monetizing that flexibility and availability that a few of the previous speakers have talked about. You heard Rory say there is a lot of value in flexibility. You heard Lisa highlight all the work they are doing to shift demand out of peak times. We are trying to do the same thing, and we are trying to do it with our downtime. We want to shift some of our downtime out of peak times and into areas where the prices are lower.
The other part, which Tania talked about, which we're targeting, is to find alternate scenarios for our stay-in-business CapEx spend. Currently, our one is quite conservative. It's a worldview driven by fundamental engineering principles. We believe we can do a better job by informing what work we do and when we do it using as much hard data as possible rather than some of our historic practices. That's what we're going after. The next thing I want to talk about is how we're doing it. We've got a four-year program, which we've just kicked off about eight weeks ago. Everything I'm presenting to you is pretty hot off the press. A big part of how we're approaching it is we're leveraging what our retail team did.
I'm hoping that next year I'll be able to stand here just like Lisa did and tell you how that's grown and what impact that's had. We're already seeing some of the early signs of the sort of experiences that they had and leveraging a lot of the same resources that they used. The sort of areas we're focusing on is how can we inform the work that we do on our assets and drive that work and trigger it more with data rather than some of the traditional ways we've done it, which is usually a calendar. Something has to be done every six months, every one year. Tania mentioned stuff that has to be done every 45 years. Another area that we're investing in is how can we optimise our outages. Many years ago, probably 10 years ago, we optimised how we use water.
A lot of you would have heard of Mercury's digital river project. We've been doing that for the last 10 years with a hydro optimisation tool. Now everybody that sits at a Meridian control desk and controls the water flow through our YTECI system does it in exactly the same way. All the improvements that are made to that approach are made consistently across anybody that sits at their desk. We're trying to achieve the same thing with the way we schedule our downtime. The guidance we got from McKinsey, who came in and gave an external perspective, is that there's actually quite a bit of value in that. That's their view. Through this initiative, we're looking to try and validate that. The other thing we're looking at is where we feel we'll get the most short-term gains is in our procurement.
We buy a lot of stuff across the generation business from a lot of different suppliers. We are looking at using, I guess, the data on our spend to understand our buying power and then to leverage it. That we feel is going to deliver a lot of value early on that we can then recycle back into this program for further improvements. Overall, there is this sort of general theme of shifting the way we do our maintenance work. If you look at it on a bit of a spectrum from how sort of your family car mechanic works, you drop your car off in the morning and you pick it up in the evening, to more like a Formula 1 pit crew where we shut the plant down for exactly the amount of time that we need to shut it down.
Everything we do to that plant, we do it based on data that we have already seen before it comes in. That is our approach, how we are going about it. I can give you guys some examples. In the last eight weeks, we have been traveling around the country talking about this program to a lot of our people at different sites, collecting ideas from them. I am pleased to share some of those ideas with you today. We were just at Manapouri the other day, and we have people telling us, "I have to walk around and check these gauges." That is a really good example of the type of manual work that you get in a utility such as ours. Lots of similar businesses would have inherited those sort of maintenance practices from their predecessor companies and cultures.
Here we have our people themselves saying, "Look, I've got to go and check this gauge. I've got to write the data down, and then I'm going to go back and type it into a maintenance system. Is there some better way we can do it?" In a short space of time, we have gone and put in sensors that collect that data automatically. We have used the same data platforms our retail team is using to pull that data to our analysts. They have quickly developed analytics that can make sure that data finds the right person at the right time.
The hardest part, the part we actually work on, is the cultural change to be like, "Cool, now can we change our behavior to deliver that value back to the business in the form of that's increased time available to do something higher value?" What we're finding is this is as much a cultural change as it is a systems one within the generation business. In the short space of eight weeks, we've found and actually tried and implemented ideas that have saved time, they've saved money, and they've involved technology investment that we are going to leverage and reutilize on an ongoing basis going forward. We've really learned how to pull those value levers where you're actually reducing downtime. We're reducing the time taken to do outages.
We're reducing the time in our maintenance system required to actually conduct tasks and manage the risks that we have to manage. Lastly, we're also really focused on, through these initiatives, proving out and validating whether we're going to see the lagging indicators, which are the value pools. Are we seeing the reductions in OpEx? Are we seeing those alternate scenarios for stay-in-business CapEx? That is effectively further funding for this program is contingent on us proving that value is there. Yeah, I think a current investment we've got this year is about NZD4 million. We're looking to generate a return of about NZD2 million at least on that. I mean, the early signs is that that value is there. Basically, further funding on this program is contingent on us actually proving that that's the case going forward.
Yeah, I think that's about all we had to share with you today. Happy to take any questions.
Thanks for that. The YTECI replacement looks to be one of the larger items on that maintenance slide. Any idea of cost for that at the moment?
Do you want to come back?
Yeah. Maz is actually working on that for us at the moment. We're aiming to hopefully get to FID next year. Costs at this stage, Maz, is it about NZD300 million-NZD400 million? I can't remember.
Yeah, NZD400, yeah.
What we've chosen to do with that station upgrade, and actually we've had some good conversations with Mercury and kind of they've got some good learnings from Karāpiro. One of the ways to de-risk it is everything from head gate to draft tube. Brand new. Do not try and integrate new stuff with old stuff. Mercury said it's a big mistake and it'll cost you. It's cost them a little bit on Karāpiro in terms of issues they've had to sort out with old automation trying to integrate with new kit. The bits that we will recycle, obviously, is the civils because that's pretty expensive. We would only adjust the civils if it was economically worth it, which Karāpiro did. They made their, what it's called?
The draft tube.
The draft tube bigger. They got more capacity out of it. Other than that, you do not want to do anything with the civils. There is a little bit you can see on the seismic resilience, the Waitaki Dam uplift management. There is a little bit of work we need to do on the Hornell Gallery there to strengthen that. It is like when you renovate your house, if your piles need a little bit of work, it is important to do that before you spend a whole lot of money on renovation. There is a little bit of that that we will do concurrently. Yeah.
Thanks. Just to clarify, you mentioned you spend NZD115 million on core SIB CapEx.
NZD15.
Oh, sorry, NZD15, right. These projects are obviously on top of that.
These are over and above. The sort of core recurring average of NZD15 million is for stuff you're generally having to do every single year. It is mainly on hydro. The wind is pretty OpEx hungry. These are over and above. We sort of have some choice around it. The choice is really driven by timing. That is part of the DigiGEN initiative, actually, how do we kind of stretch that timing out and create more choice for ourselves and increase that flexibility we have on the discretion.
I'm not sure if it's coming up later in the presentation, but is there a SIB CapEx pathway over the next few years?
Yeah, Owen's going to talk about that next.
Cool. Thanks.
Let's ask you what a great segue, Owen. Over to you.
[Foreign language] again. It is a great segue. I credit the person who planned the agenda. Hopefully, it is obvious to you that I am not Mandy Simpson, nor am I the CFO. Unfortunately, Mandy is laid up in Wellington with something called COVID. Who knew that was a thing? But she is listening in. So Mandy, kia ora and best wishes for a speedy recovery. I had this session in mind because we quite often get asked about our stay-in-business CapEx, even as most recently as 30 seconds ago. I thought it would be a great idea to put someone up to talk about it. I never envisaged it would be me. Welcome to a session on stay-in-business CapEx. The question we usually get is, why does it keep going up?
Before I get to that, I just want to talk a little bit about what it is or is not. In very broad terms, it is the capital expenditure that we make or choose to make to maintain both our asset base and our systems. Now, the great thing about stay-in-business CapEx is there is no formal definition of it under accounting standards. Our stay-in-business CapEx may be quite different to some other large electricity generator, for example. Typically, what goes into it is the investment into asset and technology life cycles. Think about things like major repairs or replacement of components that extend existing asset lives. To be very clear, what it does exclude is asset investment that we make that either adds new or additional installed capacity into our portfolio and results in higher generation output. That for us is growth CapEx.
There are a few wrinkles or uniqueness about it. One is in relation to wind. Our stay-in-business CapEx excludes major wind component repairs. We will recognize and capitalize the two main components of a turbine, which is the turbine itself, everything above the ground, and the foundation, which is everything below the ground, excluding the cabling. Any repairs we make to components of the turbine itself over the life of a wind farm asset are treated as OpEx. You will not typically see a lot of wind stay-in-business CapEx. Why does it matter? It is a component of our operating free cash flow. That is the basis by which the board pays a dividend on. It does have a direct relationship with the yield that we are able to produce. It is a factor in how the market values Meridian, but also how Meridian values itself.
Rory's team do a lot of work with Mandy's team around an annual accounting valuation of our asset base, which can result in quite large swings. Yes, it's going up or has been going up. I'm just going to step through a few of the components. As Tan's alluded to, we are trying to frame up our stay-in-business CapEx along the lines of that which is recurring and that which is periodic. I'll just mix and match a bit between the two, but just touching on a couple of points. Our dramas with our Wellington corporate office on the Queens Wharf Waterfront are pretty well known. As has been our long-awaited move into new premises in the Old Bank Arcade. We made a significant investment in our people to provide them with what is a world-class office, I think.
That has had tremendous feedback and sort of positive engagement sentiment. You will see periodic property investment by Meridian. We are moving into downtown Auckland offices. We are planning some refurbishment of the interior of our Christchurch offices. There is an ongoing program of work there, and we put more and more chargers into our assets. Those sort of costs come through. What you might not know is Mike runs a forestry business, not necessarily for the product, but we are building a carbon sink with the intention of being able to offset our residual operational emissions beyond 2030. What that means is we will build and manage and maintain a continuous forestry model where we will steadily transition away from what is predominantly early planting of exotics into more native timber over time and achieve a much better biodiversity outcome in our portfolio.
At the moment, that's about 14 planting projects. We've got 750 hectares of forest recognized in the ETS, and we'll add another 250 hectares of that. What that means is currently we've got about 8,500 credits per annum in the ETS, and we're looking to almost double that from 2030 onwards. I think we're unlikely to stop. We are currently considering further afforestation initiatives. You are likely to see forest creation as an ongoing line of stay-in-business CapEx. SCADA, I'll talk to in a little more detail later. Flux obviously is an investment ceases with our selection of Kraken as a technology partner. Tan's touched on generation investment on a reoccurring basis. We have the same thing with IT. There's just an ongoing program of work about improvement, replacement, cyber resilience of a complex set of systems.
Again, that kind of level in the mid-teens is something you can expect to see going forward. Vehicles for us is an investment program that is part of a long-term commitment to a 100% EV fleet. We have got close to about 100 either pure EV or hybrid vehicles out of a total of 150 passenger and commercial vehicles currently. We are aiming for full electrification by 2028. That is a challenging target. Not so much for passenger vehicles where we are at 100%, but the New Zealand market is still very limited for commercial pure EV models. We impose some pretty strict safety conditions. Some of the four-wheel drive requirements that we have are not yet met by available stock. In relation to periodic generation, I am going to mention the T word.
We've talked a lot about our transformer issues, but that cost will continue to hit our business until we are through a full replacement of transformers. We are having an ongoing discussion with the provider of our transformers around the situation we're in. I'd love to really tell you what wicket gates are, but I think there was a picture at the start of Tan's presentation. Essentially, they're adjustable vanes that sit around a hydro turbine that control the flow of water. They're reasonably important pieces of kit. Manapouri automation is a long-term project doing what it says on the tin, which is automating control systems and operating systems at Manapouri. If I stand back from the CapEx picture, yes, it's more than doubled in the last five years.
Within that five-year period of spend, we are doing a one in 10 year SCADA replacement property investment and Manapouri automation that probably occurs in the 20-year time horizon. Transformers are meant to last something like 40 years. And Benmore penstocks is a once almost in a lifetime project. That is what it has looked like. What it is going to look like is a likely peak this financial year. For the first time, we are giving you some direction around where we see it going in FY2027. A lot of the in-flight programs will continue. We will reach a natural end of transformer replacement, hopefully for a very long time. We will also add into FY2026 some other periodic generation projects at a number of hydro stations and at the Manapouri Lake control facility.
What I would say as a general guide is that we expect to see all recurring spend. Generation IT, corporate property, vehicles, etc., probably falling into the medium-term NZD 40 million-NZD 50 million bucket. Just depending on the decisions we make around periodic spend, reference back to Tan's slide on strategic investment, that might average out over time in the order of NZD 20 million-NZD 30 million. Broadly and as an indicative number over time, probably in the NZD 60 million-NZD 70 million of stay-in-business CapEx, caveated by the fact that some of this periodic investment will turn up in significant chunks. If you take the example of Waitaki station replacement, it is likely to be both growth and stay-in-business CapEx as we get into the project. We will not suddenly hit NZD 400 million of stay-in-business CapEx in one year.
A little bit of a dive into two current projects. To monitor and control our generation assets centrally without the need for having operators on each site, we use a generation control system using SCADA technology. It is a reasonably standard thing globally. It does reach end of life in about a 10-year period. We have operated a Siemens system since 1998. The last significant spend on that was completed 12 years ago. We are into a new system or new investment in a new system from Hitachi. That will total about NZD 55 million. We started that work late in 2024, and we are aiming for go-live in 2027. The very best project outcome is that no one notices we make the change. It is progressing well. The key elements of the system are tested.
We've set up a secure test facility in Twizel, and we are doing a bunch of work along with third-party organizations, including PwC, on a continuous review of the work that we're doing. It is complex. There are testing delays and integration challenges along with it, but we're pretty confident about the mid-2027 deadline. The second project I just wanted to lift the hood on a little bit is Benmore penstocks. I actually sit on the project steering committee for this, and it's not because I bring an enormous amount of unique engineering experience. After each monthly meeting, I usually go and have a lie down. What I'm going to do is beam Mike right into the room. He's our project manager, and he's going to give you a little bit of a flavor for what we're doing with the Benmore penstocks.
A penstock is the tube that takes the water from the top of the dam down to the unit that generates the electricity. Every dam has a penstock of sorts. Benmore penstocks are constructed of concrete, which is very unusual. These are about five and a half meters internal diameter. The slope section is about 130 meters long. Each penstock takes about 110 cubic meters at full flow. There is an enormous amount of water screaming past my ear right now. We want to be able to generate electricity pretty quickly after an Alpine Fault 8 magnitude event. That is a really big earthquake. For us to be able to do that, we need to invest and make sure that these penstocks essentially have very minimal damage. No one else in the world is retrofitting a concrete penstock to improve its seismic resilience.
The assets here at Bimble show a really high level of resilience, except for the slope section of the penstock. The project will deliver strengthening to that slope section to bring it up to meet the rest of the system all the way from the intake structure through to the tailrace itself. We're working with our main contractor, Site Construction, to come up with a system that's going to support the penstock while we're still generating electricity. That will allow us to slip the existing bearing out and replace that. We're also going to apply some fiberglass wrap to the penstock. We're going to fit some fluid viscous dampers, which are pretty much like a car shock absorber, and that will help dissipate some of that seismic energy.
We're also going to modify the top end of the slope section to make sure that it's got enough freedom of movement when the earthquake happens. It feels really exciting to be delivering something that's essentially going to outlast me. I'm really excited to get stuck into it.
Back when Benmore was built, for economic and labor reasons and a bit of Kiwi ingenuity, we bypassed the steel option in terms of penstock construction and elected prefabricated concrete. I guess New Zealand's seismic maturity has evolved since those penstocks were built, and it now looks a pretty interesting choice with the benefit of hindsight. It does give us a fantastic engineering opportunity to improve the seismic resilience.
Without scaring the horses, a 75% chance of a magnitude 8 or higher earthquake on the Alpine Fault in the next 50 years, the whole country is operating under that risk. It is not just a Meridian-specific one. It is going to happen. It is just a question of when. What we are really doing with this project is ensuring that we can seismically shore up the risk to the penstock so that we can get Benmore up and running in a large quake. The reason for the focus on Benmore is it obviously sits at one end of the high voltage DC link between the South and North Islands. We can power up Benmore and get that generation north.
Typically with our hydro stations, the structures have a very high level of resilience to earthquakes, but our investigations have revealed that the concrete penstocks are a critical vulnerability. We have done an enormous amount of work on this project without having actually changed anything yet. What we have plotted is a way through that complex engineering so that we are able to minimize outages. What that will mean is that we will replace bearings essentially without a station outage, and that is 636 replacements. We will avoid close to 42 months of station outages doing the approach that we are doing. It will cost us, depending on the current design, probably in the order of NZD110 million-NZD111 million. Do not hold us to that number because we are not yet at final design stage.
The first question I asked when I got on the project was, "Why don't we just replace them?" Without doing any deep financial analysis, that's probably NZD500,000,000 and eight years of a station outage. I have already asked my dumb question on the project on the first day I sat down. It is likely that we will business case this with our board probably early 2027 once we have completed the detailed design and we have more cost certainty. The project is probably likely to be carried out from that point culminating mid to late 2029. That was really it. I am loath to ask for questions, but please. I bet Vignesh is first. I will just put a caveat in.
I may phone a friend actually and divert quite a few of these over to Tan's because she's the gatekeeper to the decent chunk of our stay-in-business CapEx.
Thanks, guys. A quick one. Just want a bit more color on the FY2028 and 2029 numbers. You sort of talked to SIB CapEx peaking in FY2026. If you just take a factory number of NZD45 million base and add on a NZD35 million per annum for Bimble based on the 110, and then add on a NZD70 million per year for the Waitaki scheme, you get to NZD120 million. Just wondering if that's the better style of number on average for the next seven years?
I think your Waitaki's numbers are a bit hot. Some of that will be growth CapEx as the replacement spend effectively builds further generation capacity out of the asset.
I think we're reasonably comfortable with where we kind of pitch the longer-term view. That obviously is the most significant project on Tan's pipeline. It has the potential to move our stay-in-business CapEx around a bit. I think what we will do is continue to put forward a consistent view of spend that's reoccurring and then specific projects that are periodic so you get a bit of flavor for it.
Do you know how much of the Waitaki is growth?
Not yet. When we do, I think we'll provide some direction on that. Maz is probably in a better position to give you a sense of the type of spend that goes into it or that will go into it. It's pretty early days on that project. Okay. Thanks. Tan's just going to a sk me a question.
No, I'm not.
Just to add to that, on the one-page sort of investment pipeline you saw for generation, you might have noticed there's a couple of Ōhau pieces of work. The Ōhau A and then B and C, you might remember a few years ago we started a refurbishment to extend the life on Ōhau A. We did two units, and then with the smelter issues, we sort of pulled out and pivoted to Manapouri. Those two bits of work might not be a refurb. We might do upgrades. We're just doing a study at the moment. As with Waitaki, some of that might be growth. You can see there the team is sort of saying we might get 80 megawatts additional uplift across those three projects, Waitaki and Ōhau chain. We're just yet to quantify that, but some of that will be growth as well.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Guy. Cheers, guys. Bit short. Morning, Ikota. Kogaiawai Pairatene Nooronga Whakata Ahau. I'm Meridian's GM Development. I've been in this role for nearly five years, so I feel very fortunate to play a fun role to have. It's one that there's a lot of scrutiny within the company, but also externally around the industry's ability to fill the void that's been left by gas and to accelerate our run rate. It's a lot of fun doing that. I've got three of my crew here. Rebecca Knott, she's our Head of Renewable Development, responsible for the front end of our pipeline, making sure colloquially we're doing the right projects. Chris Moore, the back end, you would have met him yesterday up here at Tiritiho. Similarly, doing the projects right. Then Murray's going to talk later about hydro dev, so Went Steel has thunder.
We're about 70 people in Meridian now, plus a bunch of contractors, so we've really put our money where our mouth is around this, and it's great to see the new generation of young people coming through the sector and the dev space. In the kind of heat of battle, they're learning a lot and they're growing and developing. It's really fun to watch that happening. The purpose of my presentation is to take you through some numbers because you all like numbers. A few years ago when we set up our team, Meridian's 30% of the market, so we thought, what's the aspiration? What's our responsibility in terms of growth? Consistent with our market share, we came up with this tagline 7 by 7, which was a proxy for kind of get shit done.
We had no idea what the seven projects was going to be apart from Harapaki. That was our only development option that we had in our portfolio in those days. The rest of it was wait and see. Now we have a really clear view of seven. I think by the time you get to this, you will see we will outperform that number by a decent margin. The executive summary: in construction or constructed. Constructed is Harapaki. In construction is Ruakaka Solar, Tirahui Solar. That is our half of the joint venture with Nova. I have also included the Tohei Solar Farm because we are taking all the off-take of that solar farm. Between those two in construction, we have one and a quarter terawatt hours of new generation coming on or on. Consented, we have Tiritiho.
We have Mount Monroe, and we have the second phase of Tirahui. In combined, that's another 1.3 terawatt hours of new generation. Contrary to what some people might say externally, we're pushing all of our consented projects to FID. I'll talk about that a bit more on those slides. In the consent sheet, we've got another three-quarters of a terawatt hour of solar projects. Behind that, we've got a couple of real big projects in Waihinu Energy Park. That's a wind and solar play and also Western Bay Solar. I'll talk about those as well. You quickly get up to a number. It's hard to move the dial in Meridian because it's such a big base. By the time you get through that first phase, there's three terawatt hours of projects we can actually look and see and touch.
The ones going to the fast track take us up towards five to six terawatt hours. It is big numbers. Okay, let's start with the built ones. Harapaki, you guys will be familiar with Harapaki. Many of you will be. It has just done a year, and after the year of everything that we have run, we do a post-project review. Pleasingly, this is the best project Meridian's done in the wind space. It is hitting its numbers. It is hitting great availability. The Siemens machines are fantastic. We have rated up about 3% of its P50 output to 558 gigs. Its revenue is up 50% on the business case. She has paid off a big chunk of her student loan already, which is also very pleasing.
That is despite us sharing some of that revenue back with Siemens to encourage them or incentivize them to get that project to hit an accelerated timeframe. We actually hit our original timeframe on that project despite Cyclone Gabrielle and other events we navigated. Pretty proud. The Ruakaka Battery, we commissioned that in May. We have had a couple of equipment issues to fix, and we are through that now. We have had a period where a peaking plant does not really like the market, as in lots of water, lots of wind, not that much volatility. We have not really got to see yet how this asset will operate as a real peaker. It is different than an energy-producing machine. The pools of value for the asset are firstly arbitrage, charge low, sell high.
The reserve market, it participates in the reserve market, so it gets reserve revenues, but also Transpower allocate through the TPM to Meridian a decent chunk of HVDC reserve charges. Us being in the reserve market is reducing reserve market costs, but that is also reducing the cost we pay on the HVDC reserve charges. North Island portfolio hedge cover, this is kind of ROI space, but to cover our portfolio, the wholesale team buy cover, peak cover usually. The fact that we have got a battery available to cover peaks means we can reduce our hedge cover. There is the stuff that you guys cannot really see, which is the tighter connectivity between our South Island generation portfolio and the North Island market. Those are all the sources of value that we attribute to the best. In construction, Ruakaka Solar, we are moving dirt now.
The EPC guys are in with the equipment's coming into New Zealand. That will, like solar does, start to take shape really quickly in the new year. The real pleasing part of this is because it's part of our Ruakaka BESS energy park, we've done all the plumbing into the national grid. The grid's been our grid connection we sized for both assets. We built the substation for both assets, all the switchgear is in place. As soon as these strings come online, we do not have to wait for the whole grid connection process, which means first power is in a year's time, which is remarkably fast. As you all know, early revenue is gold for power projects. Tirahui stage one. Nova are actually the on-site project managers for this project. We have come in, it's a JV.
Rebecca and I are both on the JV board on behalf of Meridian. They had obviously had enough confidence in their partner to start construction before we hit FID. That is why that project's looking a lot more advanced than you would think for the FID date that we took. Again, really pleased that thing's up and running. We both have to decide about stage two. Given the fixed costs that are going into stage one, that stage two gets a free ride over. I think we both in character incentivize to pull the trigger on stage two pretty quickly, which will take that up to a 400 megawatt solar farm. That is it. Yep. In construction. Consented, Mount Monroe, which is just on the other side of the Tararuas in the Wairarapa, closest town is Eketahuna. That was consented in February.
We got the full 80 megawatts of turbines consented, which is great. The project economics look really sound. It is a class one wind site. We are working hard to take that to FID next December. That is a stretch target, but that is our target, to try to do that. Similar to Tirahui, we will look to put a package of enabling works ahead of that FID date because the economics look so good, which will mean when the project moves into construction, we get a really good clean run at the project site. Tirahui, look, most of you, I will not go over this again. We got a good run-through with Chris Nallen of the project yesterday. It is super energy productive. This will be the most productive power-to-weight wind farm in the country by our kind of data. Capacity factor over 50%, that is unheard of.
I think we will do the, we will probably do that 40th turbine, which will take the combined output up to 70-ish gigawatt hours. In consent, we have three solar farms currently in consents, one and other, that is just out of Christchurch. We got the regional consent last week, I think. We did, yeah. Swana and Waikato? Yep. That is pleasing. We need regional councils and district council consent. We have one out of two for both the Swana and Waikato. One is near Morrinsville. That is a plug into the local power code network, so it is a pretty easy, close grid connection. That is the reason why we really like that Morrinsville option. Hopefully we will get the district consents on both of these. They are of that size that we can kind of fit them into what we are doing around the rest of our portfolio.
The last one on the list is Manawatu 2 Solar. We've got a consent for a battery at Bunnythorpe. We've got an option to purchase the land adjacent to that battery, adjacent to Bunnythorpe substation, so a pretty simple plug into the national grid. Again, the energy park idea, you get two assets for the same fixed cost of one transmission connection. That looks pretty economic as well. If you kind of go back through Harapaki, Ruakaka BESS, the two we're building now, which is Ruakaka Solar, Tirahui, that's four out of seven. You look through this, you quickly get to kind of close to 10 projects rather than seven that all look in really good shape. Following these guys are the two really big projects within our portfolio.
Waihinu wind farm, that looks to us like it'll be Meridian's biggest wind farm probably ever in that kind of 300-plus megawatt scale. A massive wind farm by any stretch, well over a terawatt hour. It still has the space and we will consent the option to have solar plumbed into that as well. It will be a substantial substation. If we can do two large facilities for that kind of transmission connection for the price of one, it really, really helps the economics for both. We should be ready to submit that by the end of the year. We've got one landowner to get to sign up to a transmission easement and then we are clear and all the paperwork's done. Western Bay Solar, we've got a little bit of work around landowner connection assets for the access to the national grid.
Again, pretty large 400-500 megawatt scale solar farm on quite difficult, unproductive land otherwise on the shores of Lake Taupō. It is a part of the country where people are keen on retiring land from farming to reduce the nutrients into the lake. There is a lot of good about that option as well. Okay, that is our kind of wind solar portfolio. I will quickly touch on Waitaki reconsenting because our hearing wrapped up. Was it last week, Humphrey? Was it the week before? It was last week, hey. Times, who knows where time goes. We had a really good run, a really good run, I thought, at the Environment Court. We had super high-quality evidence providers on behalf of Meridian. Largest RMA consent ever, given the Waitaki first consent was done pre-RMA, so it is a substantial consent.
To only have one opponent, as in Forest and Bird, at a consent hearing that large kind of shows the work that was done prior to that hearing to get all the stakeholders and iwi on the bus. It is in the hands of the judge and the panel now. I feel good about it, but it is their decision ultimately. The Genesis fast track decision, even though that is a different construct, the concept is very, very, very similar. We feel like that is a really good precedent for the Waitaki. Finally, Jason talked about this a bit and Humphrey is talking about fast track. I will not go into this too much, but we have got the Pukaki Lake lowering in the fast track. It is a three-year ask for unfettered access to that contingent storage.
Myself and another guy called Grant Telfar were around and we set this trigger and we expected last year that that trigger would have been triggered and we would have had access to that water. It was surprising it did not work and annoying. It makes sense to kind of get rid of that in our view for this interim period until we go through the next few years while all this new generation comes online. That is our ask and we are hoping we get a really good hearing. That is me. Pātai.
Thanks, Guy. Just two questions from me. First one on the, was the Northland, sorry, the solar project, sorry, one second, to Rahui. Meridian's contribution to the equity, NZD 55 million, the whole project, NZD 350 million CapEx. Sorry, is that equity Meridian's contribution?
That debt, probably roughly two-thirds of the project, that's all off balance sheet. Is that how that works?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Should we look at Patrick? Yeah. That was the plan, so that's good.
Those sorts of projects with the PPA backing can get two-thirds good debt.
We are, I mean, this is a Meridian PPA, so Meridian is underwriting the entire project. That was part of why we were selected. We offered to underwrite the entire project and tip in equity on their behalf. It looks pretty good. The banking process, I think, was pretty competitive.
Great. Second one on the Waihinu Energy Park. That's a huge amount of energy. I was sort of wondering if that starts to impact, I suppose, market pricing when maybe it's phased, but yeah, huge amount of energy in that one project.
Just wondering if that impacts, starts to impact a few things if all that's coming online at one time.
Yeah, and look, who knows exactly how many gigs or megas that will be. That's our kind of footprint going into the consenting process. It's possible we'll be pared back a few turbines here and there because these are really big. Yeah. It's not too dissimilar to Tauhara. Tauhara's a gig, and that didn't really move the dial. We'll see closer to the time and we'll see how things look and what makes sense. I don't think we'll do the solar and the wind together. I think that will be a, those will be staged for sure. Yeah, it's good to have a bigger option. You can always walk back from that if you think it's a bit overcooked.
Thanks, Guy. A couple of questions.
First one, I guess when we look at everyone's sort of development plans over the last few years, it'd be fair to say there's tended to be more delays than there are anything. I don't think I've actually heard of a project coming forward. In terms of the timeframes that we've put up here, what do you see are the risks to those timeframes? How confident are you, I guess, about delivering some of the timeframes here given what's happened, I guess, over the last two or three years?
Yeah. That's a good question, as you know, Andrew. And we typically put up a bullish view of what we're trying to achieve. You know what they say, shoot for the moon or whatever, shoot for the stars and land on the moon. That's our kind of attitude with us. The Mount Monroe piece is fully within our control.
As fast as we can work, that one feels okay. It's when things move outside of your control is when you start to get a little bit about timing. Tirahui, there's a few other counterparties. We've got this Airways facility to move. We talked to you guys about that yesterday. That involves Palmerston North and Airways. We've got a lot of paperwork to pull together before we can do that thing. It needs to be consented. We need an agreement with Palmerston North for the land and Airways to move it. We've got drafts for all of those in place. Yeah, that's probably the one that there's a little bit of outside of our control risk on time. It's going to happen because the economics are really, really strong. We do really want to get access to that full next year's summer construction window.
We will move heaven and earth to make sure we can kind of hit fit by Q3 next year. Further out, these ones that are still in the consenting, these things are still taking too long to come out of a pretty benign project. They are on farm land. They are in the middle. Bunnythorpe, you could say, is kind of down the road, but in the middle of nowhere, you could almost argue. Things just take a bit longer than they should for everybody. That is hard to kind of pick some timings around these guys. Again, they all look pretty good economically. For the bigger ones coming through the fast track, that will be a first for us. We are not really sure how long it will take to get through that.
As you go further out, you have a little bit less confidence in time. The front-end ones, we feel pretty good about. The Tirahui one is all consented. That is just a Nova Energy Meridian conversation, that one. We seem pretty much aligned. Provided the current project is executed well, the idea is we would roll the existing OEMs through to the next phase. It kind of makes the most sense.
The second question, I guess, was just around the capacity to be able to build all of these. It looks like all of these solar projects, for example, had consented around about the same time. Conceptually, they could be being built at the same time or you are looking at potentially phasing things to make the management a little bit easier, move teams from one site to another, etc.
Yeah, we have not thought about, I mean, the good thing about these solar projects is we have got two in play at the moment. We are learning a lot around how to manage an EPC construct. It is actually great. We have got Nova doing the boots on the ground work for Tirahui. It means we get the benefit of that, but we do not have to throw a team of, say, four or five people at it. Because that tends to be a constraint as your human capacity to keep an oversight of these projects. I think these are the ones we will be able to layer in to the bigger wind farm projects and to make sure we kind of optimize the way our resources are allocated across the team as a whole.
I mean, to get to the point where we've got choices and options around consents and when to pull the trigger will be a great place to be. We haven't been in that place yet. It's kind of a good problem to have having more on your plate than you can eat.
Thanks, Guy. Just a quick question for me. In terms of these sort of solar projects, would you expect to do those on balance sheet or does that sort of special purpose vehicle, highly geared model, is that a preferred way to build Meridian solar going forward?
No, I think we'll do them on balance sheet as long as Patrick's cool with that.
I mean, having gone through, we will use this in my view, having been through that JV negotiation and how long it took and how expensive it was to conclude, that was worth it because the project's great. It's good quality. They're a good partner. It's a big project. At that scale, I don't think the transaction costs, I think they're a bit high for projects of this scale. They kind of add the fat end of a year to a development process. I don't think we'd want to take that on ourselves unless we really, really had to. If we were going to do some kind of move them on in the future, I think we would do the front-end and structure them in a way that you could move them down the track and de-risk them.
Yeah, I'd rather not have to do lots of JVs.
I see you've got the Transpower design underway on the bottom of those as well. I mean, how much is the Transpower process? Obviously, they're looking for staff. They've got a lot to do. How much do you think that is likely to be a roadblock to development projects, even if you had the consents?
It's not the reason why we're getting them underway early is because we want to get them underway early. We're trying our best to make sure they've got a lot of people coming at them. They're doing a pretty good job in my view in trying to balance the old world, which was here's a project every now and again to here's 100 projects in a queue.
They do not really have the luxury of going, "Oh, all these companies are not real, so these things are not going to get done." They have to be pretty straight up and down with what they do for who. Our view never is to get them off your critical path, not them, but get that part of your project off your critical path so that you have all the levers of control around timeframe. We are prepared to spend the money to do that because we can.
Okay. Nothing in the slide pack on the hydro development team or any of the options?
Yeah, Murray is going to talk about hydro development later. Cool. All right. Looks like we are done. Over to you, Wayne. Thank you.
Thanks, everyone. Good news. We are running slightly ahead of schedule, so long lunchtime. We will kick off 1:15 P.M., so that is 15 minutes early.
That gives us a bit over an hour to entertain ourselves outside. For those of you online, we'll see you back at 1:15. Thank you.
Right, we may as well crack on into it. Kia ora, Tātou, ko Humphrey Tepa ingoa, nō Ōtautahi ahau, nō Waihopai aku te puna, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Hey, look, my name is Humphrey Tepa. I'm in the legal team. I work alongside Jace, and I'm the Chief Legal Advisor, and I specialize in environment and property. I've been at Meridian now for, I'll be close to 18 years, so it's been a good fun ride. I'm very happy today to talk to you about fast track consenting and the journey that we have been on in relation to consenting in New Zealand. After lunch, I know that we've shut the doors. Apparently I've got three hours.
That's what Owen told me. We're going to do a page turning exercise, section by section. We'll delve into the detail. We'll pull out some of the cases, and then we'll do a bit of a test at the end. Look, what I'll be looking at doing is providing a bit of background context, and then I'll be outlining, sort of from my perspective, 10 key points and just bless it. When I wrote this presentation, the government has come out with a new amendment bill to the fast track. That came out on the 3rd of November. It had the first reading on the 6th of November, and submissions closed on that on the 17th of November.
I think the media announcement was more around grocery and supermarket competition, but there are a number of quite important changes to that act, which are actually beneficial to the wider sector, which I'll cover off as well. First point, background, consenting, the journey as I was outlining that we've all been through. The RMA is a beast, and it has become increasingly complex and protracted. Like, it is very difficult to get things done. I'm sure everyone in the room is aware of people and developments and things having problems in relation to that consenting, consenting outcomes. That's, you know, that has occurred in the electricity sector as well that you've seen from time to time. What's happened is that across the sector, both developers and also NGOs and environmental advocates agree that the RMA needs to be, needs to be fixed.
Everyone is of that opinion. There is up for reform, and the fast track enables some of that. When you apply for a consent, one of the things to bear in mind with nationally important infrastructure under the RMA, you do not get an easier ride. The RMA, you know, if you are looking to do an extension to a house, it is the same framework that applies to a nationally important piece of kit. We have always been pushing for a separate process, and that has occurred overseas. For example, in London, if you are looking at doing a large development there, they have the major developments in Greater London. They have the Town and Country Planning Mayor of London Order 2008, which enables different activities.
Large activities, if you're building more than 28 meters next door to the Thames, you go through a different, different process. In Australia, if you're doing a major project or you're doing a state significant development, or you're doing a development within a priority development area, you go through a different process. This is what the Fast Track Act is actually aimed at. It is aimed at infrastructure, which is of nationally and regionally importance. There is also, separately, we're anticipating the RMA replacement to pop out shortly. We expect there to be two bills to come out. They're running out of sitting days now. The expectation is either in the first week or second week of December, there should be two new bills coming out.
They will have to be introduced to Parliament, and they will have to do the first reading as well in order to get it through before Christmas. Those two new bills, what we are anticipating, what people are thinking is that there will be a, natural, Environment Act and also a Planning Act, and they will talk to each other. That will be what will replace the RMA moving forward. Submissions would likely be open. Hopefully they do not close end of January because no one will get a holiday. We are looking possibly that it may be to the end of February when people can actually submit on it, but that would be the, the new tool across New Zealand in relation to all development. The next point I would also like to outline is current consenting options.
Just to provide a little bit of the state of play at the moment. When you're looking at this, you have various avenues in relation to consenting. You have non-notified. Your non-notified consent is your standard consent process within 20 working days. That would be the gold standard. If you can get something through non-notified, that's brilliant. The consents that Guy was talking about earlier, the regional consents, they were all processed non-notified. That makes life a lot easier. The next sort of consenting process, if you like, would be limited notified. That's where a number of individuals or entities are identified as being affected, and so you have a limited pool of people who are involved in a process. That would be your next approach. Then you have the publicly notified approach.
That is when it is, you know, full blow and, you know, it is in the paper. Everyone can actually put a submission in. Everyone can participate. The RMA is all about public participation. The expectation is that everyone will jump in there and put a submission in. Those are all two-step processes. They would all have a council hearing, and then if someone appeals it, you go off to the Environment Court and you can appeal that and go on, et cetera. An alternative option is the direct referral approach. Direct referral is a one-stop shop. You go straight to the Environment Court and you have one hearing in that space. The reason why you do that is because of costs and efficiencies, because you know you have too many people, you are going to get an appeal.
You might as well just cut to the chase and go straight to the court immediately. It's a double-edged sword though, because it's a first instance hearing. You haven't teased everything out, so you're going to have to call probably more evidence than what would otherwise be the case. The Environment Court process will probably take it possibly a little bit longer, and you also have to pay for everything. You then have a call-in process, which the Minister can elect to do. You also have the private plan change, which is another process that we actually did at Meridian. We did that for lowering Pukaki. So allowing to go from 518 to 513, it was a prohibited activity. You couldn't actually apply for a consent for that, but you could apply for a plan change. That's how it got embedded in the plan.
The next option at the moment, the current consenting options, you have the fast track approvals act, which I'll get onto on the next slide. You have special legislation. When I say special legislation, again, an example of that would be the Manapouri Town and Development Act, 1963. That is the piece of legislation which enabled Manapouri to actually be built. The other piece of legislation that people will probably be aware of is the National Development Act. That was sort of in the Muldoon era, about think big. That allowed the pathway for those big projects to get approved. You also have resource management, the Waitaki Catchment Amendment Act, 2004, which dealt with the Waitaki in relation to water allocation. Most recently, there has been the resource management extended durations of coastal permits for marine farms.
That sort of puts my interest because it's a rollover. All those marine farms that had to go off and get resource consents, I think there were something like, I think it's 1,200 consents that had to be reconsented, 200 within that year. The government decided that they should all just be rolled over. It saved a huge amount of time and costs in relation to that. What I'd also outline as well is the costs in relation to consenting. Back in 2021, the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission produced a report and they looked at 186 projects across New Zealand, and they found that NZD 1.29 billion is spent on average in relation to lawyers, bless them, experts, and council fees. That is quite high in relation to benchmarking within looking at all the OECD countries.
What they also found as well was that the cost of consenting has increased 70% since 2014. It is going up like that. The other thing they looked at is they looked at a cohort of four years from 2010 to 2014 and compared it to 2015 to 2019. They found that the time that it took to consent increased by 150%. What they found was that you are paying more and you are getting slower outcomes. That was also one of the catalysts in relation to looking forward to having a review. This is the Meridian timeline, if you like, in relation to our projects. The first project there, I am not quite sure if you can read it, but you have got Te Āpiti down at the bottom there. That is actually a wind farm here, 55 turbines.
That was consented, at a council hearing that took 76 days. This was in 2003. I'm told that there was then a race between Te Āpiti and Whitehill. Whitehill was consented a year later. Ironically, it took 76 days as well from the date it was lodged to the date they got the decision. The hearing time took, they had three days, a three-day hearing, for that one. Then things start to blow out. You've got Westwind, it's about two years. The next three, you've got Northbank, Hayes, and Mill Creek, works out to about four years. Project Hayes, it was council hearing, approved, declined in the Environment Court. We put an appeal into the High Court and we were successful with the appeal and it was remitted back to the Environment Court. We paused it.
Central Wind was a two-stage hearing. That was a council hearing, then to the Environment Court. That's about two and a half years or thereabouts. Huronui, that was a direct referral. It took a wee bit longer, because it was a first-instance hearing. You actually have to go through a lot more material. Most recently, Mount Monroe. Mount Monroe was also a direct referral. There's no finger-pointing in relation to this. This is just the process. This is just how long it takes. We're hoping, moving forward in relation to fast track, that things will get a lot better, a lot quicker, and a lot cheaper. The ones on the right there, the low ones, you've got the batteries, and both all those batteries were processed non-notified.
They took 94 days, 106 days, 39 days, and 132. The Ruakaka Solar regional consent, that was appealed by Forest and Bird as one of the appellants. We had a two-day Environment Court mediation, which resolved that matter. That one took, you know, 503 days. Moving forward, the expectation is that things should get better. Fast track, it is, it's quite a brutal and blunt tool. It is real, once you're in the process, everyone is working flat out. It's all hands on deck. It is, you know, and you get one crack at it. You are not, it doesn't reduce the amount of work that you have to do upfront. Your comprehensive environmental assessments are still the same. You still have to do all the heavy lifting. You still have to do all the work.
You still have to have all the answers. It's not a shortcut in relation to assessing environmental effects. You still need to do everything that you can. When this act first came out, it was only end of last year. Then it was paused for new activities. New activities could not get involved on the fast track until the 7th of February. It's actually quite a short timeframe unless you were already listed, which we were not. There have been five projects consented to date. I have listed them there. You have the Wharf up in Auckland. They are saying that is a NZD 200 million development, that one, which brings a, they are talking about 160,000 jobs by 2053 is what they are suggesting. You have Meteor Village, which is 180 houses, down in Nelson.
You've got another housing development, Milldale, which is 1,100 homes. You've got the Tekapo Power Scheme. Most recently, the Drury Metropolitan Centre, which is a 53-hectare development. It's looking at the economics where it was going to input NZD 1.45 billion into Auckland within the next 11 years. These are the things that the fast track have actually sort of, they've gone through a process and these things have popped out now, which is particularly good and particularly helpful in relation to that. We're anticipating another four additional decisions before Christmas. There are another 24 still being processed. Just before I checked on the fast track site, for renewable projects, I see there are 30 renewable energy projects listed in that schedule that we'll be looking to be progressed. What's Meridian doing with the fast track?
We have earmarked three projects, which Guy spoke about, but we have the contingent storage referral application, which was launched on the 5th of November. The substantive application, that is, which is Guy Fawkes Day. Hopefully that is not a nomen. Winery Energy Park and Western Bay Solar would also be perfect developments to go through that particular process. The anticipation is once you get to the substantive stage, timewise, on average, you are looking at about 36 weeks for a decision to pop out. It is a lot faster compared to the charts that I have circulated earlier. The fast track approval is a different purpose. It is a different act.
It's, you know, you look at the RMA and part two is often described as the engine room because it's talking about sustainable management. Whereas the fast track approvals act, it's designed, its whole purpose is designed to facilitate the delivery of infrastructure and development projects. That's what it's there for. That's of significant benefit because you can anticipate that all the legal submissions hone back into section three of the fast track approvals act and signal that this is what it's designed for. This is what the decision makers need to focus their minds on. Not every project can actually utilize the fast track. There is a threshold, if you like, to determine what a nationally or regionally important project is. There is a section 22 of the act that actually lists that.
It can either be identified in a plan, but generally speaking, it's about new nationally or regionally significant infrastructure or it's looking to maintain critical infrastructure. It's more focused on the economics, and it'll be driven in relation to that. The economic evidence that you attach to your applications from the outset is critical and particularly important. The fifth point is speed. It does trade broad public participation for targeted engagement. If at the moment you're adjacent to a fast track project, you can expect to be invited to make comments on it. The panel have the ability to ask comments of any party that they like. The panel who are selected have a lot of leeway themselves in relation to how they run the particular process.
You still, like as an applicant, when you're utilizing this, it's not a shortcut in relation to environmental assessments. You still need to do the work. There's also ineligible projects. There are some projects or some areas where you can't even apply. If you're on Murray land, you need, you must have the written agreement before you lodge your application in. Otherwise, you won't even be accepted. There's no point applying. The same with access arrangements and under the Crown Minerals Act, some aquaculture activities and also national parks and/or national reserves, subject to, if subject to section 24, that's actually a carve out for existing electricity environments or sectors or existing electricity infrastructure that's already in place.
The other thing to bear in mind is, point number seven now is that the fast track approvals act, it's a one-stop shop, which is particularly useful. It includes everything. If you need wildlife permits, it will get incorporated within your application. If you need any concessions from the Department of Conservation, it's incorporated within your application. If you need archaeological approvals, it's incorporated within your application. You get a broad suite of all your environmental authorizations all at the same time, assessing all the information in front of those decision makers then and there. It's particularly helpful, from a developer's point of view. Quite often you will get your substantive consents, and then there'll sort of be a dribble of additional consents that you need to get, and you need an extra one over here, and you need to do this.
This is intended to prevent that from happening and to provide a more sort of efficient outcome for everyone that's involved. Decisions. The applications are heard by an expert panel. The convener would appoint the panel. The panel would normally consist of a lawyer and technical experts to assist in relation to whatever the key particular issues are. You know, if it's ecology, you would have an expert in ecology. If it's groundwater ecology, you'd have someone in that space. Hearings, the panel can determine whether or not a hearing is required. Generally speaking, it's rare for there to be a hearing. The vast majority of matters will be determined on the papers, unless the applicant can make a request for a hearing.
Sometimes, if there are matters which are more appropriately tested in an environment where you can have an exchange, that could be an outcome one would seek. Generally speaking, I can see, you know, 99% of these matters all just being determined with paper, on the papers by the panel. I guess, point number 10, the key tests. This is probably one of the more important elements. I have outlined below the two areas there. You would have to ensure, to have an application turned down, that the adverse impacts are out of proportion to the regional national benefits. That is the new test now. The piece beside it deals with the criteria.
You can see there that the first matter that the decision maker must turn their minds to is the purpose of this act. Everything else follows below that. As a decision maker, the adverse effects would have to be so sufficiently significant to be out of proportion to the project's benefit for that to result in a decline. It sets quite a high benchmark, from our point of view. This is the process. It is a two-step process in relation to the referral application, or sorry, in relation to the fast track approvals act. You have to get referred first. You will put an application in. The minister will look at it. They'll do a checklist first. It will get spun around within government for everyone to make comments on.
Then everything will come back, come back to the minister. The minister, even though it is not provided here, the expectation is once the minister has all the information, they would make a decision around 20 working days as to whether or not your application meets the thresholds and whether or not it can be included as a fast track application. There is broad discretion there. There is a lot of movement, and the minister can accept it or decline it. Once you are in, the next step is in relation to your substantive application. You have two years after being referred. You cannot just sit on your hands. The whole purpose of the fast track approvals act is actually to get things moving, to help the economy, to build stuff, for things to happen.
This is, you know, you actually, you can't bank stuff. You have to utilize it. The flow chart beside you there, that's simply from MFE. Again, it's an iterative process. The panel convener will select the expert panel. The expert panel will then go out to, they can seek their own advice. The expert panel can go, "Well, we want a legal opinion on this," or "We want further advice on additional matters." It's very flexible from the panel's point of view in relation to additional information that they can seek. They will go out and they will seek comments. After they get those comments back, the applicant will be able to make comments on those comments. Then the panel will go off and make a decision. I wanted to outline costs. It's not cheap.
Your referral application is just over NZD21,000. The substantive application is NZD448,500. It is a user pay system. In saying that, you know, the costs that we've experienced on a two-stage process have been, you know, quite, quite high. Mount Monroe, which was a direct referral application, you have to pay for the court. For Mount Monroe, Meridian paid NZD77,000 for an eight-day hearing in the Environment Court. That covers venue, accommodation, mileage. You pay for absolutely everything. It's nicely iterated, like outlined, so you know exactly what you're paying for. You also have to pay for the council as well. You have to cover all their costs. There's no such thing as a free lunch with consenting under the RMA. The costs per day are also outlined there.
The reason I've done that is there was a difficulty initially when the fast track first came out, in that it was hard for the panel conveners to find people, because it's a small network of RMA practitioners. They're all super busy. Why would I want to do this job if I'm getting paid doing more over here? They have actually introduced it so it's at market rates now. There can be additional costs that the EPA can pass on to the applicant as well. Getting onto the amendment bill now, I've only got three slides in this area. Essentially, the appeal rights are limited now. You can't go to the, after appealing to the High Court, you can't go to the Court of Appeal unless you first get leave from the Supreme Court.
That's acting as another sort of barrier there that you would have to jump through. The other aspect as well is that the amendment bill restricts other parties from appealing. If comments are invited from another party, the panel must first go to the council and ask them if they are covering off those aspects. If they are covering off those aspects, they're not allowed to then invite comments from this other third party. That could be an NGO, for example. If the council comes back and says, "Look, we're not gonna cover that," then the panel can then ask that third party.
I can see that the councils are gonna have a much greater role in relation to the fast track approvals act, and they will actually be controlling a lot more and be more heavily engaged in that space, I suspect. The other thing is that there is now gonna be a general policy statement. I understand the first one is gonna be about supermarkets, but the expectation would be, you know, could there be one for renewable energy moving forward? That would mean that you would get past the first referral stage a lot easier without having to do the work. Would there be a benchmark or a threshold in relation to that? I don't know, but it certainly makes sense to enable the government at the time to make those calls and to see what would be appropriate.
The other amendment they've made, and these, all these amendments are particularly helpful and useful in the sense of when the Fast Track Act first came out, there were a few sort of teething issues with it. This amendment bill actually fixes up a lot of sort of teething issues that arose. In particular, one was rejecting the application. 'Cause if your application got rejected, it took ages to get your money back. You had to pay your check again and go through the whole process again. It was very inflexible. There are more or less a grab bag of amendments which are helpful moving forward from a developer's point of view.
In particular, the Taronga Wharf, you may recall they went off to the High Court and there was an argument in relation to whether the Stalor Wharf and the Mount Maunganui Wharf, whether both wharves were actually referred, because they left off a few words when they listed it under the Act. The High Court said, "You can only apply for what was actually stated within it." Because there was an omission, that part of the application got rejected. Now, they fixed that up and the Minister can actually amend those elements to ensure that things are a lot more seamless in that space. The Minister can also determine a project as a priority before a panel is made up, because there are delays being experienced in that area.
The whole emphasis has been trying to speed things up, which is, you know, certainly is helpful for us moving forward. Listed projects, they, you may make a written request to the minister for stages. You, that enables you to apply in various components, which is also beneficial. There's also the reduced consultation at the outset. Prior to, currently, if you want to put a referral application in, you must first consult with council and Iwi. But it was always a sort of a little bit, we were unsure as to what consult actually meant in that space and what happens if someone does not want to consult with you, and/or you cannot find the time. Now there's a process there where you can consult, and then the other party, they need to provide written advice within 20 working days from that consultation.
It means that things can keep on, keep on moving. There's also the ability for the EPA to request further information now, whereas previously what would've happened is they would've chucked your application out and you would have to start again. Now they can actually sort of go, "Well, hang on, you've got this missing. Can you please provide it?" The last three bullet points are all about speeding the process up. The bill is saying that the efficiencies are likely to introduce up to six weeks being saved. Last slide. An applicant or a local authority can raise concerns about a prospective panel member. It's probably unlikely, to be honest. I don't think you'd be particularly successful in that regard unless it was something quite, quite telling.
If it was quite telling, the expectation would be that that member would remove themselves in any regard. At least there's a backstop there. The referral applications, substantive applications are also sped up now, which is helpful in the sense of the complete and checking scope tests enable an approach whereby everything can be done very, very quickly, if you like. The other thing is, sorry, second last bullet point, applicants can continue with competing applications, which basically means like previously you could only apply under the fast track. You could not sort of simultaneously do other things under the RMA. Now you can do both at the same time, which allows avenues. It may mean that you can apply for some components under the RMA and other components under the fast track approvals bill.
It would be actually quite beneficial in that space. The submissions closed for this amendment bill on the 17th of November. Our submission just went in on Monday. The expectation is that these amendments would be passed before the end of this year. They'll be being pushed through as quickly as possible as well. That's me. I'm more than happy to take any questions about fast track consenting and what's happening in that space and what people are up to.
Just a clarification, I guess, as much as anything, but you mentioned that, if you go through the fast track approvals process, you have to use that consent within two years. I assume that means getting to FID within two years of receiving consent.
No. You have got, once you go through the referral process, you have to apply for the substantive step. You go into the referral process, you get a tick, then within two years you have to apply for your substantive application. Once you have got that, you have five years to actually then implement it.
To actually then go and build the project. Okay. 'Cause I guess it was one of the criticisms in the past is that there was quite a lot of, I guess, wind farms consented but were never built, and technology changed and you had to reconsent them all. What are the implications if you don't use the consent? Does it just lapse quite effectively? It lapses faster than the old consent. Is that the?
Yes. If you don't use it, you'll lose it.
Just a second question in terms of capacity within the system to hear all of the applications that are heading their way and, I guess, the risks around sort of congestion in that space.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a very good point. It was certainly something that we raised for the MBA. When that first came out, there was gonna be a complete new process there. There's new language and the expectation would be that there would be a bottleneck. With the fast track, there is a risk in that space, in relation to, you know, finding the appropriate experts to sit on that panel. I imagine the panel conveners are running around furiously lining people up, getting them ready for the next step of those applications. Having people available, yeah, has always been an issue. Yes, you're absolutely being on in there.
Great. Excellent. I want, I'd like to introduce Murray who's gonna cover off Hydro.
Alrighty. Feels like we've spoken a little bit about Hydro already today, but, [Foreign language] Murray Hill, [Foreign language]. This forum's new to me. For those that do not know me, I've actually been around for a little over 23 years, I think, in the company. It's been a privilege. I've worked across many of our exciting assets in a variety of different roles, both operationally, and a lot of time spent in development. Started out in Hydro, and as Tan's pointed out earlier, I managed to get back in there about a year ago as I progressed the Waitaki upgrade project.
Now, yeah, and now taking on this, this newly formed Head of Hydro Development role, you know, presents another, a really exciting opportunity for me personally, but also for the company and I think more broadly for the nation. We're at a point in time where, you know, big decisions need to be made in regards to how we navigate through what's a relatively uncertain energy transition. In terms of the role, yeah, it's pretty simple really. Developing new hydro capacity, you know, both within our existing catchments and beyond. That's the remit.
Today, while there's probably not quite enough numbers in there for this audience, I am pretty keen to, I suppose, give a sense of our ambition, the pace at which we are looking to move this along, and give you a bit of insight, you know, into some of the things we're looking at and how the pipeline may shape up over time. To do that, look, there's a bit of context and you've heard a lot of that from Rory and others, that has helped, you know, pin down what our strategy is looking to achieve. A bit about our development approach and how we're thinking about this. A couple of the key aspects to our strategy, and then, yeah, some early insights into those projects.
You might wonder why this photo's my starting point, and it wasn't to talk about Waitaki upgrade or initiate a discussion there, but this is in fact inside the scroll case of one of the units at Waitaki, which is our oldest hydro in our fleet, turning 90 years old last year. And as mentioned earlier, that is set for a major upgrade and modernization. The reason I start with this image, I mean, it's really simply to reinforce, I suppose, and acknowledge how well hydro served us over many years, you know. It really is the backbone of our electricity system. And to use one of my colleagues that you may be familiar with, Mr. Grant Telfar, you know, he talks about hydro being our energy superpower, if not our energy advantage at least.
Yeah, that's the reason for the photo. You know, as other affluent economies around the world sort of lean into their respective energy advantages, hydro's our opportunity and it feels like now's the time to be thinking about that. As we navigate the coming years and decades, we firmly believe that hydro can continue on and be pivotal to our electricity system into the future. The challenge ahead of us, there has been a fair bit of talk about that today. I will cover that off somewhat briefly as it does form some of our numbers later in the pack. You know, that challenge really is the significant growth required to electrify our economy.
Obviously some of the security of supply challenges that we've, that have been mentioned today, resolving dry year energy deficits, you know, potential re-retirement of a couple of gigawatts of thermal generation and the domestic gas supply and the decline we're seeing there. You know, some significant challenges there. From there, you know, the requirement, oops, sorry, the requirement really is, the system will need some significant growth, potentially up to 5 gigawatts of fuel-flexible.
Generation, and up to three and a half terawatt hours to solve that deficit. Some of that will come from hydro, we believe. In fact, a large proportion of that. My aim, really, and for the hydro development team, is to build a pipeline of opportunities that provide a hydro-focused response to some of these challenges and the requirements that fall off the back of them. In terms of our approach, we have not pursued hydro development for over a decade. Part of the go-forward is obviously around acknowledging the complexity and challenges of what is ahead of us. These are big problems to solve, and hydro is hard to get away. We know that. We have learnt that.
As I mentioned, recognizing the urgency and the momentum that we need to get some of these projects on the table, get them into the discussion about how they can solve some of these future challenges. To begin with, I was talking with someone earlier, a bit of unconstrained thinking. That is kind of the license. I'm not sure how long that window will stay open. What I really mean by that is everything's on the table. There are old projects that Meridian's looked at a decade ago. There are things that are currently on our plate. There are other schemes that have been talked about historically.
is really a good time to take stock of all of that, run this new context or new ruler over those projects, and for us to quickly get to a point where we understand where the valuable projects are, what the priorities should be as we progress. Given we have not been here for a good decade, we certainly have to build capability in hydro development specifically. We know development. Rebecca has got a great team of folk developing wind and solar. We know how to do it, but that expertise, I suppose, in hydro development does not really exist in the business. What we can draw on is a whole bunch of operational hydro knowledge and expertise, a whole bunch of consenting experience from the last time we revisited development with any sort of vigor.
Beyond that, to get some real momentum on this, we'll lean on external expertise, people that have been developing hydro internationally over the last decade or so to really get the pace going. Yeah, that's the challenge. Some big numbers there, as we've talked about earlier in the day, and I suppose a bit of a summary of how we're thinking of what our approach is, really. This slide here is really, I suppose, the strategic plan of attack on a page. As you can see down the left-hand side there, there's a couple of categories, one around flexible generation and one around storage. There's some numbers attached to that. They become, I suppose, the direction setters for us as a team. Now, those numbers are really based on the requirements that I spoke about earlier and Rory spoke about earlier in the day.
To get to these numbers from those contextual numbers and system requirements, I mean, really what we're assuming is hydro plays a big part in solving those problems, and Meridian contributes significantly to that hydro element. I suppose what's most important in those numbers is not the numbers themselves. I think it's really the magnitude of those numbers. What it means is, well, incremental gains, either within our catchments or with new hydro developments, will be important and will be valuable, I think, if we're to change or, sorry, if we're to really move the dial and solve some of these future problems and close that gap on those requirements, then we need to be thinking fairly boldly, and we need to find some decent opportunities of scale. In terms of the rest of that slide, yeah, two key pillars, I suppose, that make up the strategy.
Down the left-hand column there, the technical and economic feasibility, I mean, that's almost table stakes. That's about finding the right projects that make sense economically and technically. We know how to do that. We do it now in wind, solar, batteries. That's a process that we know, and we're confident that those opportunities will exist. It's about getting in there, finding the right ones, and progressing some engineering and some analysis. The right-hand side of that, the pathway to approval, I think that's really where the thinking needs to happen. As you saw in Humphrey's last presentation, the dark art of consenting and approval. I think as we progress some of these hydro opportunities, we really need to do some solid thinking about how those projects progress in parallel to technical detail. Some of these projects could well require different approvals, different pathways.
In fact, it's quite likely. Yeah, I really see the left-hand side stuff we're comfortable with. That's what we do. I think the pathway to approval is where we really need to think hard and develop good strategies to progress some of these initiatives. All righty. Moving on to this, which is probably the slide most people are wanting to talk about and see. This is really an early teaser for what a pipeline might look like. Down the left-hand side, that first column is some of the near-term activities that we're currently engaged in and currently progressing. At a high level, that's about building a quality pipeline, investigations, understanding priorities, etc. As you can see, the bottom half of this table is broken up into storage and flexible generation, which are the targets that we talked about just previously.
There's also a line in there for water diversion, which is another concept that is a concept that's come out of historical projects and is essentially about diverting water from beyond a catchment into an existing catchment, for instance. Across those three areas, and in that first column, you can see the flavor of things that are currently on the table, some of which we've talked about today in some detail. Contingent storage, we've heard about that. If we're successful there, that secures that for three years. The next couple really is a single opportunity. Let's call it Pukaki Rays. Now, what does that actually mean? For me, I think Pukaki Rays means a few things. What can we do at Lake Pukaki with minimal engineering?
What sort of raise can we get out of that lake without a lot of engineering, a lot of remedial work, a solution that sits well with the existing Pukaki Dam and the structures that we have along that dam? Now, whether that is a one-metre raise, a two-metre raise, that is the work we are doing to understand that. I think our next level of detail there when you consider raising Pukaki is, and the question I want answered is, given the existing dam, how far can we take that? What engineering can we do to that dam, to those structures that sit along that dam? What is the potential? I think that will be an interesting exercise. Beyond that, you will get to some point where the ambition triggers a new dam, essentially. Understanding that as well is something that we will progress.
Yeah, when I think about Pukaki raise, it's really those three steps, really, and those three separate opportunities. The next couple of lines really associated with the Wai-O, that first one, Manapouri, is actually Manapouri lower access and Te Anau lower access. That's really about accessing more water in the lower band of those regimes. Pump storage gets a mention there. Absolutely, we will consider pump storage opportunities, both within our existing catchments or beyond. The flexible generation at the bottom, and some of this is not new to us. Some of the work going on within Tania's team has already been seeking out additional flexible generation.
That first one is around Manapouri and looking at how we can increase flexibility at that power station, which involves putting water through that power station, pulsing it through the power station, but keeping water flows into the sounds the same as what it's currently able to do. Pukaki Hydro, that's generation across that face of that dam. That's a project that's been around forever or a long time. I think as a good example where a lot of these initiatives, as we really get into the detail, you can't really look at them in isolation. If you take the Pukaki opportunity more broadly and talk about raising levels, contingent storage, understanding the implications for the existing structures along the face of that dam, and then considering an additional generation plant on the face of that dam, it all needs to come together.
I think in all reality, we will probably look hard at some of those raise options, understand what they are before we dive too deep back into a Pukaki generation option. Yeah, a few others mentioned there that have already been talked about. The Waitaki Power Station upgrade, yes, I mean, that is part of the mix because we are looking to increase capacity of that power station. That is potentially taking what is a 105-megawatt power station to 120 or beyond. 120, 130 is the current feedback we're getting from the OEMs that we're engaged with. Again, the reason is around that flexibility problem that we're trying to solve. As we move to the right across this table, the near term, I think, yeah, it's about developing that pipeline, getting some good quant and quality behind what we put on the table.
I think there is a program of work now over the next five or six months that really will help push that along. Potentially, the next time we are talking to these types of initiatives, you will get to see some numbers alongside them. In the medium term, locking in some of those incremental gains, those projects that start to move us in the right direction and provide some additional storage, more flexible generation is what we will look to do. Medium-term aspirations. The further out to the right you go, we get into vision territory, right? This is, I suppose, the point I made on the last slide and the scale of some of those numbers. To really move the dial on those numbers and make a difference, Hydro is going to have to find some decent projects of scale.
When I think about the two existing catchments, they do present quite different opportunities and different complexities for us. On the one hand, Waitaki, you would say more modified catchment, less population. There is no town on the edge of Lake Pukaki. Very soon to be reconsented, bit of certainty for us there. If you move to the Manapouri catchment, obviously more populated. You have the towns of Manapouri, Te Anau on the lake edges. You are operating a power station within a World Heritage Park. More stakeholders, more interest. Two approval regimes. I feel the Manapouri is more complex. There are certainly opportunities there that we will look at. Pukaki feels like some of those opportunities are probably easier to get momentum on, is my gut feel.
Yeah, the work over the next 6 to 12 months, as I said, is about confirming that direction, picking those projects that are worthy of more detail and more work. It really is being bold enough to look at those schemes that really move the dial for me. Along the way, we will take those incremental gains. The opportunity for Hydro, and if it is to support our energy future, mean that we can have some self-sufficiency in terms of our energy system and keep those LNG ships at bay, then we need to find some good sizable projects. That is about me in terms of the slides, but I am keen to hear from you all for maybe one question. Have we got time for one?
Thanks, Murray. Do I get just one question?
Perhaps the one to ask about is the water division projects, presumably into your own existing schemes. Are we talking sort of some of the projects of the past, drilling hol es through the Alps and... Right. Is that the only one, though? Are there other options?
That's the one we will take a look at, and that has actually started. And that's that project in and of itself. This is relating to the Pukaki catchment, taking water from adjacent valleys, catchments, diverting water into Pukaki. I mean, it's pretty obvious why we like that. We've got six power stations that are already built, already have infrastructure to generate using any water that we can add into that catchment. Again, it does kind of tie back into th e fact that a lot of these opportunities are linked, right?
You can imagine if you're raising the lake, some additional water is going to make that project even more valuable and so forth. Yep, water diversion, it's a concept. I mean, it's not a new concept, right? It's used in Hydro elsewhere. Yeah, that's certainly something of interest. Equally, Nev, that same concept could be applied to our other catchment. I think we will also look more broadly beyond our catchments as well. That concept of water diversion should probably be considered as we look towards more greenfield-type opportunities in other parts of the country, which we will get to. Lower Waitaki. Pardon me?
Lower Waitaki.
Probably less so. I think, yeah, it's a good point. What's not evident in our strategy is run-of-river Hydro.
We are really focused on hydro that does have some storage attached to it because that's what the system needs.
Although adding more generation at the bottom of the chain would mean the gigawatt-hours stored at the top.
Yeah. It also potentially doubles down in terms of our dry year problem as well. Yeah, it's about storage and flexible generation.
Looking at your rule of thumb there on that slide, it looks like to get a terawatt-hour of storage, you need about 5 meters or something at Pukaki, is that about right?
Yeah, I suppose if you back-calculate, yeah, I think it's a little bit more than that.
What does that do to Pukaki from a... Obviously, there's significant costs involved from your point of view, but just from a... How does Pukaki look 5 meters higher than it is today?
Yeah, quite different, I suppose.
That is part of what we are getting to the bottom of. That is not to say that all of that terawatt-hour comes from a single project too, by the way. As you suggest, if it does come from Pukaki, then yeah, obviously for us, there is an implication for gate 18, gate 19 across the face of that dam as a starting point. That is a significant change, right? At 1 metre, 1 plus metres, there is impact, but it is probably manageable with some engineering either along the dam face or around the lake shore. Once you are into multi-metre territory, certainly implications, and that is what makes these projects complex. It is also the opportunity for the country, right? It would not be the first time that Lake Pukaki has been raised either.
Not off yet, Maz.
Obviously, I've been waiting patiently all day, and finally, someone's asked an online question, so here I go. The first question's from Ian, also from Jason, probably Earl also. Any views on Lake Onslow being... Near wall, any views on Onslow, really is the question.
Any views on Onslow? Oh, look, certainly interested in how Onslow 2.0 progresses and what scale and size that ends up being. Yeah, absolutely. Interested. And yeah, why not? Those are the types of projects that the system will require in the future. That is what we're all looking for.
Got one more for you, Maz. Any chance that Project Echo will be reborn?
I suspect not. For probably, yeah, a multitude of reasons. One we just mentioned, Nev. And perhaps if we did look at it again, we might get to the same conclusion we did last time. I do not think so.
All righty. Thank you, Owen. I think it's time to call on Mike now for some closing comment.
Looks like my first electric car, that one. First thing is thanks, everybody, for your time. I hope you heard what I heard from people, which is we've got a bunch of incredibly experienced, capable, and talented people within our business who are all committed to the success of it. That's what we wanted to communicate to you today. My message is really simple. Meridian's got the strength, the resilience, and the capability to lead, and we will. I'm going to close it at that, other than for one thing, which is I've got to give a couple of prizes of merch out, apparently, to some folk who I don't know.
There were two Meridian folk who were on this, so I've scrubbed them entirely on the leaderboard because that does not sound right to me. I could not believe it when I saw that. The leader by Country Mile was where's James? James Gill, where is he? Country Mile. Like, what did you do? Is this the golf? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the golf merch. What I did was I lined it up and I just tried to hit it. Anyway, there were a lot of people hitting golf balls out there at lunch. Sorry for those who are online, but James, he is not only good at what he does, but he is pretty handy outside of work as well. And Nick Draviski, well, there was one. Came in second. So there is a couple of winners. Thanks for that. It is nice to have a bit of merch, but thank you, everybody, for the day.
I think everyone's going to probably got a bit of time. I don't know how we're doing on time. We're probably about right as people start clearing out for transport here. Feel free for those who are left to mingle and ask any residual questions that you've got. Otherwise, great to see you all. Thank you for questions and participation, and we'll see you. We'll see a lot of you in the next few years.