Grant Swanepoel, director of equity research at Jarden, said Tauhara was "still a damn fine project" and cheaper than comparable wind farms being built at the moment.
Contact's strong rise in earnings for the half year is likely to be the standout performance, with Mercury (February 22) and Meridian (February 23) tipped to report a small drop in ebitda when they report.
Jarden is forecasting Genesis will report an $11m increase in ebitda on February 28, while analysts at Forsyth Barr expect a slight drop in earnings from the owner of the Huntly Power Station.
Swanepoel said he would be looking for how the companies were managing expenditure programmes, in particular Meridian, which received A$740m (NZ$795m) from the sale of its Australian business, which completed at the end of January.
Both Contact and Meridian were likely to face questions over plans for a possible hydrogen plant in Southland to potentially replace demand from the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter.
Management teams would also likely to face questions over the state of wholesale electricity prices, Swanepoel said, with hedge contracts pointing to prices of around $180 per megawatt hour over the next three to nine months.
The elevated prices were despite wholesale gas prices being well below the levels of early 2021, and hydro storage being "not much below average", he said.
"Our work on modelling this stuff says that maybe these prices don't seem to track together," Swanepoel said.
"It would be good to understand from the gentailers' perspective why they aren't selling aggressively into that forward curve, to bring it down to a more normalised, call it $120 type level."
Analysts were "outsiders looking in" Swanepoel said, and he was not suggesting anything untoward was going on in the sector, but he wanted to know if he was missing something.
"With the government always getting some political agenda out of high wholesale prices, if these prices remain at this sort of level, without a solid explanation of why they're at that sort of level, we do feel there's a bit of risk building."
During previous episodes of high wholesale prices when commentators or politicians made statements that wholesale prices were too high, Jarden's modelling tended to suggest high prices were in line with market dynamics.
John Kidd, an energy analyst at Enerlytica, said prices in the forward curve were "full" and the reasons were many, from record coal prices at the end of 2021 due to European energy troubles, record carbon prices, the impending temporary shutdown of New Zealand's largest gas field, Maui, in May and the risk of unexpected closures.
Then there was the risk of government intervention, Kidd said.
"The Minister [of Energy, Megan Woods] has said she's going to make changes as a result of a review last year, but she hasn't in any way defined or scoped what that means," Kidd said.
"Regulatory risk in the longer term is significant as well, and all that is reflected in pricing."
