A pallet has left for Oamaru, on the North Otago coast — a country that already gets 85.5% of its electricity from renewable sources. So the usual sales pitch does not apply here, and we are not going to make it.
Most places we ship to, the argument writes itself: cleaner power, lower bills, less coal. New Zealand is not most places. It solved that problem decades ago, with water. Which makes it a more interesting place to send a wind turbine, not a less interesting one.
Oamaru sits in the district New Zealand dammed.
Oamaru is the largest town in North Otago and the main town of the Waitaki District — about 14,000 people on the Pacific coast, roughly 120 km north of Dunedin. Inland from it runs the Waitaki, a river carrying eight power stations. The dam at Benmore was finished in 1965 and is still the largest earth-fill dam in the country; Aviemore followed in 1968, on a river already dammed at Waitaki in the 1930s.
This is not a place waiting to be shown what renewable energy looks like. It is a place that built it at national scale, in concrete and rock, two generations ago. Anything we send there arrives into that context.
A country with more weather than people, and a grid built to use it.
We are not going to tell you this saves the planet.
In 2024, 85.5% of New Zealand's electricity came from renewable sources. That is one of the cleanest grids in the world. Adding one household turbine in Oamaru does not meaningfully change a carbon figure, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. In a country running on brown coal, a turbine on your roof is a climate argument. Here it is not.
If carbon were the only reason to buy one, we would tell you to spend the money somewhere else.
There is a different reason, and in New Zealand it is a much better one.
The argument is the dry year.
A grid that runs on water is only as full as the lakes. In 2024 the country found that out again: after a dry May, June and July, hydro generation fell to 23,490 GWh — the lowest since 2013 — and the renewable share of electricity slipped from 88.1% the year before to 85.5%.
Water is a battery the weather refills. Most years it refills it generously. Some years it does not, and the whole country feels it at once. Living in the Waitaki does not exempt you from that — those lakes are national infrastructure, not your personal supply.
All figures from MBIE, Energy in New Zealand 2025, reporting the 2024 calendar year.
New Zealand's own answer has been wind.
The country did not respond to the dry year by building more dams. It built wind. Wind generation hit a record 3,919 GWh in 2024, up 22% on the year before, and installed wind capacity went from 691 MW in 2020 to 1,269 MW in 2024 — close to double in five years.
A household wind turbine is the same answer at the scale of one roof. Not a replacement for the grid, and not a moral position — just a second source that does not depend on how much rain fell in the Southern Alps this winter. And the timing lines up: the windy half of a New Zealand year runs roughly April to September, which is also when the days are shortest and the lakes are lowest.
Crated and loaded. From here it is roughly eighteen thousand kilometres and a change of hemisphere.
What we would say before you order one.
Oamaru is a coastal town, and the coast is hard on hardware. Salt gets into fixings and brackets long before it gets into anything you notice. Check the mounting at the start of every windy season, look at the mast and bracket for movement or corrosion, and treat the fixings as a maintenance item rather than a one-off.
Otago southerlies are not decorative either. Know how to brake the machine before a front arrives, and if you are somewhere that issues wind warnings, have the cover to hand and use it. Our six-blade Atlas set is rated 5–35 m/s and built for exposed coastal sites, but a turbine is never sounder than what holds it down.
And the part that matters most: a windy country is not a windy section. New Zealand has excellent wind on the national maps, and your own house may still sit in the lee of a shelter belt, a hill or a neighbour. Measure your own site through a windy season before you buy anything — from us or from anyone.
The only number that decides anything is the one measured on your own section.
New Zealand already generates its power from the weather. It just happens to have picked the weather that falls as rain.
We are sending the other kind.
Electricity figures — the 85.5% renewable share, the 88.1% for 2023, hydro at 23,490 GWh, wind at 3,919 GWh and 1,269 MW — are published by New Zealand's Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment in Energy in New Zealand 2025, covering the 2024 calendar year. Population and geography for Oamaru and the Waitaki, and the dates of the Waitaki, Benmore and Aviemore dams, are from public record. No customer is named here and no order detail is published. Every photograph on this page is our own, of our own products and shipments. The turbine rating is our published specification and is checkable on the product page.