Meridian looks set to build the Ruakaka Energy Park Solar Farm, with the renewable power generation tech taking off around the world, and getting cheaper

Meridian's Ruakākā Solar Farm looks set to happen, after the gentailer (electricity generator and retailer) said it received resource consent for the construction of the facility, pending any appeals and financing.

The 250,000 panel site will have a planned generation capacity of 120 megawatts (MW), and is estimated to be able to produce 150 to 250 gigawatt hours worth of electricity a year. This, Meridian says, is enough to power more than half the homes in Northland.

Expected to be ready by late 2026, the Solar Farm is the second part of the Ruakākā Energy Park where a 100 MW battery is already under construction, to go into service early next year.

New Zealand faces soaring demand for new power generation, which the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) estimates will go up by 80% by 2050. This might be an optimistic estimate as well, if New Zealand follows the global pattern of building an increasing amount of data centres to house artificial intelligence technology, which is very power hungry.

To put that in perspective, analyst firm IDC estimated that AI workloads will bring an increase in data centre capacity at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.5% through to 2027. To match that capacity increase over the next three years, data centre energy consumption is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 44.7%, IDC said.

Worldwide, that amounts to 146.2 terawatt hours by 2027, with most of it going into power AI. IDC thinks global data centre electricity consumption will more than double in the five years between 2023 and 2028, hitting 857 TWh.

Lodestone Energy is another company with solar farms in Northland, including Kaitaia's Kohirā (33 MW). It has another generating solar farm in Edgecumbe (32 MW) and three others coming up, including one in Dargaville, and an ambitious further expansion programme to construct more facilities.

Solar is looking increasingly as the go-to option for renewable energy with generation rising sharply over the past decade.

The popularity of solar is helped by steep declines in panel pricing as capacity increases.

Like battery technology, solar panel technology is under intense research to improve its ability to generate power. One such avenue is using perovskites solar cells in combination with existing silicon ones, which results in an efficiency of sunlight converted to power at 32.5%. 

The technology is promising, but not without some challenges such as improving the stability of the cells, and preventing them from degrading due to environmental factors, before perovskites solar cells can become commercialised. 

Korean researchers now believe they've got a bit further down the track in that respect.

"Polycrystalline formamidinium lead iodide (FAPbI3), widely used for making perovskite-based solar cells due to its superior optoelectronic properties, suffers from defects in its crystalline structure."

"... a team of researchers led by Professor Hobeom Kim from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) has developed a new defect passivation strategy, a process to significantly reduce defects and improve power conversion efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells."

Unfortunately, as you can see from the above, perovskite solar cells are made with lead which, unless it can be replaced by another material, most likely presents the greatest challenge to their acceptance.