Replacing forestry with solar power.
It’s just a suggestion at this stage, but the potential to replace some forestry blocks with solar farms is something the Ashburton District Council is going to investigate.
Chief executive Hamish Riach said a preliminary conversation had taken place with the property and forestry departments after the topic was raised, and it was now “on our radar”.
No specific site has been identified, just the potential to switch from forestry to a solar farm as a renewable income stream.
The council, which has 75 plantations of which 27 are small (2 hectares or less) gravel reserves, adopted a Climate Resilience Plan this month.
That sets out the direction to implement its climate change policy and the plan included an objective to “investigate and implement opportunities for increasing sustainability”.
One of the actions was to assess council buildings and investigate the viability of solar panels.
The council’s new library and civic centre has provisions for future installation of solar panels because it was not deemed cost effective to include them from the outset, Riach said.
“There is a good example where we have already assessed a particular building, come to a view that it wasn’t the right thing to do at that time but didn’t want to close it off as an option down the track.
“There is provision there to put [solar] on should they be cost effective to do so in the future.”

• By Jonathan Leask