Lodestone Fires Up Coromandel Solar, First Power

• New Zealand’s Lodestone flips first power at 33‑MWp Coromandel solar farm, easing summer bottlenecks, boosting daytime renewables, future battery-ready—with biodiversity gains and local jobs powering electrification and data centers.

Lodestone Energy has generated first power from a 33-MWp solar farm on New Zealand’s North Island, its fourth plant on the Coromandel Peninsula, easing summer transmission constraints. The lender-friendly build uses high-efficiency modules, single-axis trackers, string inverters, and a grid-tuned plant controller. Biodiversity features—pollinator cover and wildlife corridors—help maintain social license.

New capacity adds daytime solar to a grid long dominated by hydro and wind. While built as solar-only, the site reserves pad space and transformer headroom for future batteries to time-shift output and provide frequency response—value rising with electrification and data centers. Community jobs and modular clean capacity follow.

How does Lodestone’s fourth Coromandel solar farm enhance grid reliability and future flexibility?

- Diversifies supply in the region, reducing dependence on single corridors and lowering the risk of coincident outages from weather or maintenance
- Provides fast active and reactive power control to hold voltage and manage ramps, improving stability on weak rural feeders
- Offers ride-through and curtailment controls that smooth cloud-driven variability and limit sudden power swings seen by the grid operator
- Enhances dry-year and drought resilience by displacing daytime hydro generation, preserving water in storage for evening and winter peaks
- Adds geographic dispersion to North Island solar, reducing output correlation and improving aggregate forecast accuracy for dispatchers
- Supports congestion management with programmable export limits and dynamic setpoints, easing stress on local lines in high-demand seasons
- Enables future grid-forming capabilities when a battery is added, allowing synthetic inertia, fast frequency response, and black-start support
- Creates a pathway for time-shifting solar via future storage, firming evening supply for growing electrification and data-center loads
- Integrates with advanced forecasting and telemetry so the system operator can schedule reserves more efficiently and reduce contingency costs
- Uses modular plant architecture that can be augmented (more strings or storage blocks) without major re-permitting, keeping options open as demand grows
- Improves maintenance resilience through sectionalization and remote monitoring, minimizing forced outages and keeping capacity available during faults
- Facilitates local resilience projects—future co-sited batteries or community microgrids—providing backup power during storms or planned outages