THE boss of Scottish Power has said that developing wind farms in England is “godforsaken” despite changes which the UK Government promised last year.
Keith Anderson told MPs that the company, which is one of the UK’s largest wind farm builders, was not planning to construct any onshore sites in England.
Anderson said: “If I speak from the part of our company that is a wind farm developer. I am not proposing, or planning, or looking at developing any onshore wind farms in England. It’s godforsaken,” he told the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee.
“The number of sites available aren’t that great, the wind yields aren’t that brilliant, but the process is cumbersome, slow, difficult and fraught with uncertainty.”
READ MORE: Scottish Power Glasgow headquarters stormed in protest over energy bills
It comes months after the UK Government made changes to the planning rules, promising they would lift the de facto ban on onshore wind in the country.
Under the former system, if a single local resident objected to the wind farm, planning permission could be refused.
But Renewable UK’s Barney Wharton told the MPs that the changes did not go far enough and that small sites in England still faced major hurdles to putting up wind turbines.
“The changes aren’t sufficient, if you want to build onshore wind in England, we need to see some fundamental changes to, for example, the footnotes in the national planning policy framework,” said Warton, who is the trade body’s director of future electricity systems.
“The vast majority of onshore wind in England will be smaller projects, smaller sites, but if I want to put a small turbine on the roof of my house I am subject essentially to the same planning requirements that someone building a 100-megawatt wind farm would be subject to. That’s wild.”
READ MORE: Scotland to England renewable energy cable project awarded £1.8bn
The comments come after a power grid project transporting renewable energy from Scotland to the north of England was awarded contracts worth £1.8 billion.
The Eastern Green Link 1 (EGL1) project will see the construction of a £2.5bn high-voltage power line along the east coast from East Lothian to County Durham.
Work on the project is due to commence in 2025 and is set to be one of the UK’s largest grid upgrades in decades.
International cable manufacturing company Prysmian Group has now been awarded the contract to deliver nearly 400km of power cable. Meanwhile, GE Vernova and Mytilineos were contracted to supply two converter stations – one at each end of the cable.
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