Energy Minister David Parker says he does not want the proposed Waverley windfarm being blocked by red tape.

Allco Wind Energy's bid for consent to build a 45-turbine farm on the Waverley coast will be heard by the South Taranaki District Council on May 5.

Most of 127 submissions made oppose the consent being granted.

Mr Parker, in a speech to the NZ Wind Energy Association in Hamilton this week, said the Government is discouraging fossil-fuelled power stations and encouraging wind and geothermal projects to meet its goal of 90% of the country's electricity by 2025 being generated from renewable sources.

"We can integrate significantly more wind power than we currently have," he said.

"It's essential that suitable renewable energy projects gain resource consents.

"We will therefore be providing guidance for local authorities on the importance of renewables, through a national policy statement.

"This will influence consent decisions.

"This does not mean renewables at any environmental cost. We don't need to dam every river or have wind turbines on every ridge."

He said the Environment Minister can "call in" consent applications to speed up decisions to a one-step process, where an appeal seems almost inevitable.

Mr Parker said integration of wind into the hydro and fossil-fuelled generation network was a major challenge. The Wind Generation Investigation Project has been started to determine the best means of connecting wind over the next 10 years.

National grid operator Transpower's system operations manager Kieran Devine told the Taranaki Daily News this week that the monitoring project has already disclosed some interesting data:

"It's telling us the existing Manawatu wind farms all race up and down together, while the White Hills in Southland behaves completely differently.

"This is good because if the generation pattern is not the same everywhere, it spreads the risk of inadequate power.

"One of the major issues we face is that over the three years 2005-07, we were getting less than 1% of wind farm capacity at peak times in winter.

"We don't at this stage know whether this was weather related or by chance.

"Those farms did not contribute at all to our peak demand - it had to be covered by other non-wind generation. Over the long term wind is very reliable but in the short term you can never count on it being there when you need it in forward forecasting."