Quote Originally Posted by haewai View Post
Sadly not. It's a run of river station due to strict controls on lake level.
Whilst in the long term any hydro is a 'run of the river' station the combination of manapouri & te anau give it 660M cubic metres of head room, enough to run the station flat out for two weeks (assuming 0 inflows).
[ I hope I have got that right ]


However, the design lends itself to continuous base load scenarios and in the short term, as has been commented widely, the inability to feed the maximum power output into the main grid limit how it can be used efficiently.