Windfarms in Northumberland: Trouble Ahead
Anthony Coon
A year ago we reported that there were proposals for 30 wind farms in the county, with a total capacity 500 times that of the existing wind farm at Kirkheaton. The sites are widely distributed throughout the county except in the National Park and North Pennines AONB (where they are officially discouraged), in Kielder (where there are MoD objections), and around Newcastle airport.
No new wind farms have been built since then. However, approval has been given to 18 turbines 400 feet high at Middlemoor (north of Alnwick), which the Society opposed on landscape grounds at the inquiry. The inspector concluded that visual impact ‘lies at the heart of the inquiry’. He accepted that a wind farm landscape would be created, that views would be harmed and that the settings of Ros Castle and Hulne Park would be diminished; however, ‘the turbines would not form a visual block and the … landscape would flow through.’ He concluded that it was difficult to see how Government targets could be approached without maximum use of sites such as this. Approval was recommended and planning permission has been granted.
This is an ominous decision. The inspector’s reasoning and conclusions could well apply to the adjacent Wandylaw proposal (decision expected in February 2009), to the three giant schemes near Kirkwhelpington (the inquiry for which lasted almost throughout 2008), and to most of the 277 turbines of similar size now proposed elsewhere in open country in Northumberland.
Almost all these proposals have been opposed by the local councils (sometimes against the advice of their officers). Likewise, the local plans prepared by these councils also ruled out wind farms in designated ‘areas of high landscape value’, in which development harmful to the landscape would not be permitted. Unfortunately, when it was preparing its current renewable energy policy, these designations were ruled out of order by the Government. The current plans do not contain such policies, and the inspector at Middlemoor was able to conclude that the proposal ‘accords with … the development plan’.
Three other wind farms have been approved, all relatively small and in urban locations: Lynemouth, Cramlington and Blyth harbour (the latter two being subject to resolving Newcastle airport’s air traffic control concerns). The decision on the Alcan proposal near Lynemouth is expected shortly. Nine further schemes have come to light in the past 12 months, all in open country: two near Kiln Pit Hill in the south of the county, three more south of Berwick, two near Longhorsley, and two between Rothbury and Alnwick.
A major inquiry will take place in mid 2009 into three schemes south of Berwick, and another into a project at Kiln Pit Hill. Many other cases will come to public inquiry, and it is unlikely that the Society will have the resources to mount the case for protection of the landscape at all these inquiries. The attitude of the new Northumberland council, which will take over the planning responsibilities for the districts in April 2009, will be of crucial importance.
Most of the wind farms mentioned above have been opposed by the Ministry of Defence on grounds of interference with radar monitoring of aircraft movements. Even in the case of Middlemoor, where the subject was much discussed in open session at the inquiry, the approval which has been given is subject to the developer securing government agreement that the proposal will not have adverse impact on air defence radar. Presumably these negotiations will be out of the public eye. No great reliance should be put on the inadvertent defence by the MoD of the integrity of the Northumberland landscape. Technical or operational modifications may enable the current flood of proposals in sensitive areas to go ahead; current MoD objection seems likely to delay wind farm construction, but not to prevent it permanently.
It was MoD objection which put into cold storage a promising plan for wind farm development at Kielder prepared by the Regional Assembly 5 years ago. The plan would comfortably meet government targets for wind farms in Northumberland at this one location. The Kielder area (some 400 square km between the National Park and the Scottish border) is characterized by twentieth century conifer plantations and a reservoir, and by a comparative paucity of natural landscape features and long views: hence the landscape is far less sensitive to wind farms than the areas now being considered. Unfortunately it seems likely that MoD objections may be withdrawn in time to allow the current crop of opportunistic and dispersed proposals to go ahead, by which time it may be too late to revive the Kielder proposals for concentrated and coordinated provision.
City and County
February 2009
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