New Zealand gentailer Contact Energy has completed the installation of all solar modules at the 150MW Kōwhai Park solar PV power plant at Christchurch Airport.
The 168MWdc, 150MWac solar PV power plant is being developed by Lightsource bp in partnership with Contact Energy on a 230-hectare site on the Christchurch Airport campus, with engineering, procurement and construction delivered by CHINTEC and infrastructure services provided by Ventia.
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The facility is expected to generate over 275GWh of renewable energy per year and will connect to electricity distribution company Orion New Zealand’s 66kV distribution network.
The module installation milestone follows a construction programme that began in late 2024. The project hit its Golden Row milestone in August 2025, when the first row of modules was fully installed and signed off, validating the installation process and allowing construction to scale across the site’s thousands of remaining rows.
With all modules now in place, Contact Energy said the project is now moving into its final commissioning phase ahead of commercial operations.
Kōwhai Park is the first solar project developed under the joint venture between Lightsource bp and Contact Energy, which the two companies have described as the first of a planned series of New Zealand solar PV power plants.
The Kōwhai Park completion arrives as Contact Energy accelerates its wider renewable energy pipeline under the Contact31+ strategy announced in February 2026.
As PV Tech reported at the time, the NZ$525 million (US$316 million) equity raise aims to advance a portfolio of projects, including a new 200MW battery energy storage system (BESS), pre-final investment decision drilling for the Tauhara 2 geothermal expansion.
It also aims to support the development of the 150MWac Glorit solar PV power plant on the Kaipara Coast, being pursued with Lightsource bp at an estimated cost of NZ$305 million, with operations targeted for the third quarter of 2028.
The NZ$525 million raise, comprising a fully underwritten NZ$450 million institutional placement and a NZ$75 million retail offer, was completed in February 2026. At the time of the announcement, Kōwhai Park had more than 50% of its solar modules installed and was on track to complete in Q2 2026.
Contact Energy’s battery storage capacity has also expanded in parallel with the solar build. In April 2026, Contact switched on a 200MWh battery storage system in New Zealand, adding grid-scale firming capacity to complement the company’s growing renewable energy generation fleet.
New Zealand’s solar sector building scale
Kōwhai Park’s completion adds to a growing cohort of utility-scale solar projects now operating or under construction across New Zealand, a market that had virtually no grid-scale solar capacity as recently as 2022.
The country’s high proportion of hydro generation has historically reduced the urgency of investing in new renewable energy generation capacity, but successive dry years, including the 2024 drought that drove sharp wholesale price increases, have accelerated the case for diversifying generation.
Low rainfall, declining hydro storage reserves and natural gas shortages caused electricity prices to surge in 2024, prompting calls for greater generation diversity.
In a bid to solve this and turn the country into the “simplest developed country for solar deployment”, New Zealand’s government ordered a sector review into the installation of residential and small-to-medium-scale solar, aiming to reduce what it describes as a “red tape nightmare” that can delay approvals for months.
