Tauhara geothermal power station

Naylor Love was the design & build civil subcontractor for a Fuji-Sumitomo EPC consortium constructing a new 174MW geothermal power station on the north side of Taupō. Our role was to design and build all the buildings, pipe racks, roads, drains and sundry structures that were needed to transform Waikato farmland into a power plant with enough output to power a city the size of Hamilton, including the 230-metre-long cooling tower, an administration/workshop building and the turbine generator building.

The largest feature of the project is the turbine generator building, a multi-level structure that houses the generator, turbines and condensers, along with the main electrical rooms and other key components of the electricity generation process. The steel portal frame structure is 70m long and 40m wide and accommodates two gantry cranes which run the length of the building.

The build process was significant, with daily concrete pours of more than 750 cubic metres and up to 550 staff on site each day. This required meticulous planning for everything from worker accommodation to material deliveries. Our team coordinated closely with the other consortium partners to ensure that the build ran smoothly even through the Covid-19 pandemic, ensuring that health & safety performance and quality standards remained excellent throughout the three-year project.

Despite the pressures, we prioritised worker wellbeing and community engagement, building strong partnerships with local iwi resulting in employment opportunities for rangatahi and hosting many workshops and celebrations on site. We also set the benchmark for sustainability on a project of this size in the region, minimising, recycling and repurposing numerous waste streams and reporting on Scope 1 & 2 greenhouse gas emissions.