Gary Holden: Lodestone Managing Director on the company's focus on solar electricity, plans for the future

A new electricity gentailer is entering the market with a primary focus on large-scale solar.  

Lodestone Energy says it will initially focus on commercial and industrial sectors, but may expand if the market allows.  

It says it’s creating it fifth solar farm with plans for up to 20 more in the next few years.  

Lodestone Managing Director Gary Holden told Mike Hosking it scatters them in less-visible places like substation areas and behind hedge rows.  

He says it has a vision for every community to have its own solar farm and battery pack. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven away from it. So Loadstone Energy has become our
us to electricity retailer. There's a solar focused company that's
been supplying the market through third parties. The managing director
Gary Holdens with us on this Gary Morning.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Good morning.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
How are you so if you're I'm well, thank you.
So if you if you do generation and now you're
going to retailer, that makes you a gin Tyler, does it?

Speaker 2 (00:19):
I guess we are a miniature version of a gentil. Yes.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
How big are you in terms of solo? How much
do you produce?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
POWI was, well, we were building our fifth solar farm,
and and so we we've got a plan to do
you know, between ten and twenty solar farms in the
next four or five years. So we so we are
just starting, but we you know, the energy off of
five solar farms would power all of the houses in

(00:45):
say a city the size of Hamilton.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
That's not bad going. How big are these solar farms?
How many panels we're talking about each farm?

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Roughly? Well, each one's about fifty or sixty million dollars
and they hold anywhere between fifty and eighty thousand solar panels,
So they're pretty. They're pretty they're pretty ambitious projects, and
they can create quite a lot of energy over the year.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
How much difficulty do you run in locally with people
going I think that's ugly council's paperwork red type that
is it easy or not?

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Oh, it's been pretty easy. I think the key is
we don't we don't try to make them too big.
We you know, you can make them as big as
you want, and so we we try to tuck them
into substation areas behind hedgerows. We sort of have this
vision that every community will ultimately have its own solar
farm and maybe a battery pack in the future, and

(01:39):
so so making them big is not our plan. Our
plan is to scatter them all over the country and
make them small and digestible, and you know, and if
you tuck them in behind hedgerow, they kind of disappear.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Sure, what's your what's your supply demand ratio? In the
sense that you don't want to take on so many
customers that you know, when you can't produce enough power
to supply, what do you go to with the you
can get the power to back it up to guarantee
me as the customer.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Well effectively, what we do is we kind of over
sell the panels to a customer like you do on
your like you would put on your house, you'd probably
put a little bit more than you need for those
days when you know, you generate a little bit too
much and send it into the grid and then at
nighttime you pull it back out of the grid. And
so we kind of rely on the hydro system being

(02:25):
a big, huge battery, so we overgenerate in the middle
of the day, but we take it back at night.
Through the through the mechanisms in the market.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
You see solar as the future as opposed to win
or hydro will soar.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Solar is way cheaper and it can be put pretty
much anywhere where there's sunshine, and you know they're parts
of the country they are less attractive than others, but
most places in New Zealand are quite attractive. And and
it you know, you can install a solar farm in
eight or nine months as opposed to a big, huge

(03:00):
wind project that takes several years. And so it's really
it's really convenient and easy to build a business around
something you can put together so quickly.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Always good talk to you, appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Go well.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Gary Holden our Loadstone Energy Managing Director, more supplies what
we want, and he's supplying more supply, which is good
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