Aquaculture & Seafood Solar Marlborough: Refrigeration and freezing are a near-perfect solar load
The short answer
Seafood processing and aquaculture suit solar because refrigeration and freezing run through daylight, year round, and peak in the warm months with the sun. Marlborough holds over 80 percent of New Zealand aquaculture, concentrating that load in one sunny region. A 100 kW system costs roughly $140,000 to $180,000 installed in 2026, before the Investment Boost deduction.
Seafood is a refrigeration business. Processing, chilling and freezing draw power through daylight, every day of the year, and hardest in the warm months when Marlborough generates most. Marlborough is the centre of New Zealand aquaculture, well over 80 percent of the national total, so the region concentrates exactly the refrigerated load that solar serves best alongside good sunshine.
We are not an installer. Involve Energy models the system against your own load, arranges the financing stack and project-manages SEANZ-certified local crews through to commissioning, so you own the asset with an independent model behind it and one point of accountability.
Year-round refrigeration is the prize
Chilling and freezing run every day, so a solar system serves a steady daytime base load rather than a seasonal peak. That keeps self-consumption high, the share of generation used on site, which is what makes the payback work. Self-consumed solar avoids about 20.4 to 25.5 cents a kWh in our model; export earns only 7 to 17 cents, which is why we size to the load. The mechanics are in our guide to buy-back rates and self-consumption.
How it works
01
Feasibility
Send twelve months of power bills, ideally half-hourly data. We model system size, generation against your actual load, self-consumption, cost, savings and payback on your numbers, not industry averages.
02
Financing
We apply the Investment Boost deduction and match the remainder to the best available green or interest-free business lending, sized so the repayment sits at or below your current bill wherever the numbers support it.
03
Installation
Certified local crews install and commission the system on the processing or storage roof, or on structure alongside. We manage the lines company approval, the electrical certification and the programme around your operating calendar so the cold chain is never at risk.
04
Monitoring
Once live, we watch performance, flag anything underperforming and report your actual savings against the model, year after year.
Start with a conservative estimate below, then send a year of bills for the half-hourly version. The wider costs and payback picture is in our commercial solar guide.
The numbers
What the numbers look like
| System size | Indicative installed cost | Indicative annual saving | Indicative payback |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 kW | $54,000 to $78,000 | $7,000 to $9,000 | 5.5 to 10 years |
| 60 kW | $98,000 to $135,000 | $15,000 to $18,000 | 5 to 8.5 years |
| 100 kW | $140,000 to $180,000 | $25,000 to $31,000 | 4.5 to 7 years |
| 250 kW | $275,000 to $375,000 | $62,000 to $76,000 | 3.5 to 5.5 years |
Your numbers
Start from the example. Put in yours.
Your farm or business
Your indicative numbers
Conservative, ex GST, modelled not promised
Measure
- Power used
- 376,471 kWh a year
- Your spend at 25.5c a kWh ex GST, the national commercial average.
- Power bill
- $96,000 a year
Design
- System
- 146 kW
- Sized to your daytime load.
- Generates
- 202,940 kWh a year
- Used on site
- 80%
- The rest exports at 8c a kWh.
- Installed cost
- $190,968 to $249,368
- Confirmed with certified installers.
Finance
- Investment Boost, year one
- about $12,329
- A 20% immediate tax deduction, worth this in cash at the 28% company rate. Not a discount.
- Bank green business loans
- $2,257 a month
- 1.0% for 3 years, on the first $80,000; the remainder is financed separately, and the full stack is part of the feasibility study.
- Estimated saving
- $3,376 a month
- Mid estimate, set against the repayment while the loan runs.
Outcome
- Saving
- $36,367 to $44,647 a year
- Payback
- 4 to 6.5 years
- Net of the Investment Boost benefit.
- Emissions avoided
- 12.0 t CO₂e a year
- Asset life
- 25+ years
- Panels keep producing long after payback.
How this is modelled (assumptions v2026-10-v7)
- Power valued at $0.20 to $0.26/kWh ex GST (savings are never valued at the top of the commercial tariff range).
- Export credited at $0.08/kWh, the conservative end of current buy-back rates.
- Installed cost interpolated from 30 kW ($1,800 to $2,600/kW) down to 500 kW ($1,100 to $1,500/kW), 2025/26 working ranges.
- Marlborough yield modelled at 1390 kWh per kW per year.
- Self-consumption capped by your daytime usage profile and held below typical vendor claims; sizing targets 90 percent of daytime load.
- Investment Boost stated as the year-one cash value of the 20 percent immediate deduction at the 28 percent company rate. It is a tax timing benefit, not a discount.
- No power price escalation and no panel degradation in simple payback; omitting escalation outweighs degradation, so the net effect is conservative.
Indicative only; not financial or tax advice. The feasibility study models your site from twelve months of actual bills.
Next step
Get these numbers checked properly
The real model is built from twelve months of your bills. Send your details and we will do it for you; we reply within one working day, no obligation.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked
Why does seafood processing suit solar?
Refrigeration and freezing. A processing or storage site runs chilling and freezing through daylight, every day of the year, and hardest in the warm months when solar peaks. That steady, warm-season daytime load is close to the best match there is for solar, which is why seafood sites are among the strongest commercial cases we model.
Is Marlborough a serious aquaculture region?
It is the centre of it: Marlborough accounts for well over 80 percent of New Zealand's aquaculture, with large mussel and salmon operations and the processing and cold storage that go with them. That concentration of refrigerated load, alongside good sunshine, is what makes the region a strong fit for commercial solar.
What does a processing-site system cost?
It scales with the refrigeration and freezing load. A 100 kW system runs $140,000 to $180,000 installed at 2026 pricing and 250 kW around $275,000 to $375,000, with per-kW cost falling as size rises. The Investment Boost deduction returns about 5.6 percent of the cost in year-one tax cash for a company taxpayer.
Will solar keep the freezers running in an outage?
Not on its own; a standard grid-tied system shuts down in an outage for line-crew safety. Where cold-chain resilience matters, we model a battery and backup capability separately, since it adds cost. The energy savings come from serving your daytime refrigeration load, and the resilience question is a distinct decision.
See your processing site's numbers
Send a recent power bill and we will model system size, cost, savings and payback against your actual refrigeration and freezing load. Independent, no obligation, yours to keep.