Harapaki Wind Farm
New Zealand is striding ahead by world standards in becoming a fully renewable energy country. In the past, New Zealand renewables have focused on hydro and geothermal, and now a future shift to wind and solar. Wind farms are well developed across rural New Zealand, with a focus on the Eastern Ranges of the North Island. Meridian Energy’s Harapaki Wind Farm off State Highway 5 in Hawke’s Bay is now fully operational, generating 76MW or 70,000 average households. Being New Zealand’s second largest wind farm, costing close to NZD450Million, the project was delivered in full on time.
RDCL completed several geotechnical risk assessments from 2015 to 2018 for the wind farm, focusing on turbine locations developing a risk matrix for proposed foundation designs. Across the investigation RDCL compiled geotechnical drill data, CPT and geophysics, of which a significant portion was all in-house. An electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) survey was completed in Summer 2017 to 2018 across 42 proposed turbine locations to help identity voids and void like ground, which was considered a high geotechnical risk, due to karstic limestone across the hill country.
RDCL deployed locally based Hawke’s Bay staff across three months to complete the ERT survey, completing one site per day and compiling all previous test data to develop the risk assessment and geotechnical model for each turbine site.
Surface Geophysics mapping; electrical resistivity tomography (ERT)
Geological modelling, ground modelling, risk assessments, foundation recommendations
