ANALYSIS: They look good on paper: Nine new solar farms and three new wind farms that would produce a combined peak output of 1566 megawatts - more than three-and-a-half Clyde Dams.
The solar farms would comprise 1.9 million panels and would create 2300 jobs in their construction.
The wind farms would see 840 construction jobs to install 82 turbines which would cut 150 million kg of carbon emissions.
But there's a problem: they might not actually go ahead.
They haven't been consented. They haven't been approved. Some of them we already knew about.
The Government is announcing a massive 'if'. Their press releases used phrases like "if approved", "could generate" and "could create".
There's every chance the expert consenting panels may decline them, in which case the Government has just announced a whole lot of nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I want these projects to go ahead. I want New Zealand to be 100 percent renewable by 2030.
But I also don't want to led up the garden path with pre-election announcements that aren't worthy of an announcement because they might not actually happen.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins rebuffed these criticisms by saying the Government always announced roading projects before they were consented.
These aren't public roading projects though. These are private enterprises with private capital that will happen on mostly private land. They are not comparable.
So next time, maybe wait until these types of projects have resource consents before announcing them, their environmental benefits, their economic benefits, and how they'll contribute to achieving the ambitious 2030 goal.
There's every chance they will get a consent. But there's every chance they won't.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
Lloyd Burr is a Newshub political reporter.
