Contact Energy has once again become the owner of 150 Megawatts of fast-start, diesel-fueled peaker plant at its site at Whirinaki, north of Napier, 11 years after first putting almost exactly the same plant on the market as surplus to requirements.
In a classic case of what goes around comes around, Contact is to pay $33 million for the three units at Whirinaki, along with four million tonnes of diesel, which the government spent $150 million commissioning in 2002 in an emergency response to the 2001 winter power crisis.
In April 2001, Contact had sold the last of three 54MW peaker units at Whirinaki to its then majority shareholder Edison Mission Energy, saying the units had run for the equivalent of just one day between 1996 and 2000, reflecting the construction of major new gas-fired plant, including Contact's Otahuhu-B plant.
A decade on, and Otahuhu-B is regarded as entering its mid-life years and no longer runs as baseload generation, while the government placed the Whirinaki plant on the market as part of electricity reforms announced in 2009.
Meridian Energy had at one stage expressed interest in the plant, with a view to moving it to the South Island.
