Cash for wind farm wanted

New Zealand Windfarms expects to offer shares to the public and list on the alternative stock exchange late next month.

Chris Freear, the new company's chief executive, said funding raised from the offering of shares would be used to develop in stages a 50-megawatt wind farm, Te Rere Hau, in Manawatu.

He could not give the price and the amount being raised until the prospectus was issued.

"We are looking to open late October," he said.

NZ Windfarms is a subsidiary of Windflow Technology, New Zealand's only home-grown manufacturer of wind turbines.

The offering of shares would go ahead regardless of whether Australian investor Babcock & Brown and American investor National Power took part in a joint venture with NZ Windfarms to develop Te Rere Hau.

"If they don't come aboard, we just do it ourselves. It just takes a bit longer."

Freear said NZ Windfarms had a memorandum of understanding with the two investors to work through due diligence in the turbine technology and the wind farm company.

The two companies would decide by the first quarter next year if they would take a 50 per cent stake in the $80 million wind farm.

Windflow Technology was completing the manufacture of five 500-kilowatt, two-bladed turbines.

Their design has been enhanced after the prototype failed in March through a combination of huge gusts of wind and sudden big wind shifts.

NZ Windfarms would buy the turbines from Windflow.

Windflow chief executive Geoff Henderson told a wind conference in Wellington last week that the turbines' design had been improved since the prototype crashed and broke.

It is at Gebbies Pass on Banks Peninsula.

- NZPA