Mighty River Power Opens Ngatamariki Geothermal Power Station in New Zealand

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Perth, Australia)--Mighty River Power Limited (Auckland, New Zealand) has completed the 82-megawatt (MW) Ngatamariki Geothermal Power Plant near Taupo, New Zealand. Located approximately 17 kilometres northeast of Taupo, the power plant is "an important new asset for the company," said Doug Heffernan, the chief executive officer of Mighty River Power.

The power plant has three production geothermal wells and four re-injection wells, along with 21 sentinel and monitoring wells, with a total depth of 40 kilometres. The Ngatamariki station is considered a valuable asset for the company; it is designed to operate as a base load station, producing about 700 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually, which is the equivalent of supplying electricity to approximately 80,000 households.

This project, the largest of its type in the world, took 21 months to complete. With a peak workforce of about 450 persons on site, the project involved more than 1 million man-hours on construction, from initial earthworks to the handover.

Mighty River contributes 17% of New Zealand's electricity needs through multiple channels and retail brands, including Mercury Energy, GLO-BUG, Bosco Connect and Tiny Mighty Power. About 90% of the electricity is generated utilizing a diverse range of renewable hydro and geothermal energy stations.

The addition of the Ngatamariki will increase this contribution to more than 40% of the company's total renewable energy generation. Actual project construction was completed by June, and July and August involved testing and fine-tuning the individual units, as well as the overall plant, to check the variation of the units' total output.

Mighty River Power has geothermal permits to expand the power station capacity to 40 MW. However, the company will run the existing power station and study the geothermal resource capacity of the site to develop the expansion project.

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