From Climate Scepticism

By MARK HODGSON

In a comment on Saving the Planet by Trashing it I drew attention to an article in the Guardian, about the plans of Spanish-owned Scottish Power to dismantle Hagshaw Hill wind farm in the previously rural (but soon to be ever more heavily industrialised) South Lanarkshire. The plans don’t extend simply to dismantling the 28 year old wind turbines, but the intention is also to replace them with monster new turbines towering over the landscape.

Of course, in respect of such matters, where the Guardian leads the BBC follows (and vice versa) and the story now enjoys an extensive write-up on the BBC website too.

There is so much about this story to annoy anyone who has even a mildly sceptical outlook. First of all, there’s the fact that when many wind farms obtained planning permission (often against the wishes of local residents) an element of reassurance existed in the fact that the planning permission applicable to them was for a limited life – usually 25 years – with the prospect of the site being (even if only partially) restored when the planning permission expired. In respect of the abomination currently desecrating wild Shetland (Viking Energy’s wind farm), for instance, such assurances were given (even though the decommissioning bond in respect of this, a precondition of planning being granted, is still not in place). Here’s the Shetland News from 2018, reporting on Viking Energy’s expert witness, Tim Kirkwood:

The roads leading to the massive turbines would prove an asset to crofters once the turbines are removed, he said, but there was less certainty on the extent of reinstatement of the site, though he believed the concrete bases would ultimately be reduced and buried.

This is certainly true of Hagshaw Hill. Scottish Power have produced a glossy leaflet in respect of their plans for a new wind farm to replace the old, and in it they candidly admit that:

The planning permission for the Existing Development requires that the site is decommissioned and restored within six months of ceasing to generate electricity.

With the infrastructure now in place, however, it’s just too tempting to continue to blight both the landscape and the lives of local residents (human and animal), for there’s lots more money to be made. And so, with grim inevitability:

...the Proposed Development site partly comprises an operational wind farm nearing the end of its operational life. It is therefore considered to be a suitable site for wind energy development (repowering), making use of existing site infrastructure and recognising the accepted principle of wind energy generation at the site.

What a great euphemism – repowering. In reality it means replacing modestly intrusive wind turbines, where the nacelle was 35 meters (114 feet) above the ground, with a smaller number of massively more visible turbines with nacelles 140 metres (460 feet) above the ground – four times higher, in other words – with the tips of the blades being as high as 200 metres (650 feet).

Welcome to the future. Wherever wind farms already exist, the plan will be to extend their lives, with ever higher turbines, in perpetuity. Decommissioning, in so far as it takes place at all, will be partial (“it is not about demolition but reversing the process of construction” according to Ryan Walker, project manager for crane and transport specialist Forsyth of Denny), and will see massively more visual intrusion in the future. As the BBC puts it:

Re-powering will gather pace across Scotland as other turbines reach the end of an expected working life of 25 years, extending for some of them up to 30 years.

And as Scottish Power’s Charlie Jordan says:

Although Hagshaw is our oldest site, there were a number of windfarms built in the late 1990s which are coming to the end of their operational lives. We have a dozen more to repower over the next three or four years.

What is to happen to the concrete bases? They are to be removed (where to? What will be done with the concrete?), but new, significantly bigger, sets of concrete foundations will be required, along with a lot of other intrusive development:

A number of ancillary development components are also proposed, including a construction compound and concrete batching area; turbine laydown area; hardstandings adjacent to the wind turbines for construction, maintenance and decommissioning cranes; access tracks; underground cables between turbines; an onsite substation and maintenance building with welfare facility; an energy storage facility of around 20 MW; an underground export cable(s) alongside the access track to J11 of the M74; and two new permanent meteorological monitoring masts.

Some of the materials used in the windfarms can be recycled, most obviously the steel, but the old blades continue to be a problem. The Guardian article, naturally, doesn’t discuss this at all, but the BBC article, written by Douglas Fraser, probes – as is his excellent journalistic wont – a little deeper:

There are more than 11,000 wind turbines installed in Britain, with many more planned for offshore. And while most of a turbine can be recycled, including the steel towers and components in the gearing and generator, more than 33,000 blades present a challenge.

Many replaced blades have so far been sent to landfill. In some cases, they can be incinerated.

He does try to put a positive spin (pardon the pun) on this, by mentioning Re-Blade, a new Scottish company formed to recycle old turbine blades. Even here, though, there is yet another irony:

The skills involved in cutting extremely durable composite glass fibre are not available in Scotland, so it has gone to a boat-building firm near Colchester.

There is one final insult to people living near old wind farms earmarked by greedy foreign companies for financially lucrative “re-powering”. Not content with side-stepping the age limits on old planning consents, and with ensuring that the sites in question are blighted in total for more than half a century, they also expect their new planning applications to be fast tracked. Quite why this should be is a mystery to me, since the term of the original consents are well known to the energy companies, and they have plenty of time in which to draw up and submit their plans for new replacement wind farms, long before the old permissions expire. It seems, however, that this level of organisation is too much to ask. Perhaps, as technology continually develops, they want to leave each application until the last moment, in order to utilise the latest and most profitable technology. The price of this is presumably that local objectors will be given less time than ever to marshall their objections, in a planning process which, in Scotland at least, is already heavily stacked against them.

As if that isn’t insulting enough, the Guardian rubs salt in the wounds of distressed local residents:

ScottishPower is calling on the government to streamline the planning process for existing windfarms to take into account the lower risks of developing in an area that is well understood by developers and supported by local communities.

It is possible that some portions of local communities are won over by the “community benefits” (aka bribes) on offer, as part of this process. However, to pretend that all local communities are supportive, and that shortening an already one-sided planning process is therefore justified is – dare I say it – misinformation. The simple fact remains that although “repowering” does involve existing wind farm sites, the new proposals are on an environmentally much more damaging scale than the old ones, and local residents should be given every opportunity to have their say, rather than having the planning rug pulled from under their feet.

Note, the photograph accompanying this article was taken by me earlier this year and shows a damaged turbine (I believe it was struck by lightning some years ago) north of Hesket Newmarket in Cumbria.