A long and winding road in Wales...

On 7 September 2015 it was announced that Amber Rudd, the new secretary of state for energy and climate change, had rejected applications for four onshore wind farms and an overhead line connection in Powys, Mid Wales. A further proposal to upgrade an existing wind farm was approved, but proposals for
a power line to link it to the national electricity grid were rejected.

The announcement came after a very long wait. On 23 October 2012, a combined public inquiry into the applications was called, pursuant to section 36 of the Electricity Act 1989, because the local authority, Powys County Council, objected to the applications.

The conjoined inquiry, which was the UK’s biggest onshore wind farm public inquiry and Wales’s longest-ever planning inquiry, sat for a year during 2013/14, and involved consideration of renewable energy and planning policy, landscape, tourism, the economy, cultural heritage, and cumulative impact, among other issues.

In policy terms, there were issues in particular around the relationship between the UK government’s and the Welsh government’s views on green energy and planning. Of particular relevance was the Welsh government’s approach
of concentrating large-scale
wind energy projects in a limited number of strategic search
areas (SSAs).

The planning inspector’s report and recommendations were submitted around seven months after the inquiry closed.

The reasons cited by the government for rejecting the projects included concerns over the wind farms’ impact on the local landscape, biodiversity, heritage, and traffic. The government agreed with many
of the recommendations of the inspector, but not entirely.

Both the inspector and the energy secretary placed weight on national and Welsh policy statements, but disagreed on
the resulting conclusions they reached in light of such policy.
Of particular interest to Welsh authorities and developers will be the approach of the inspector to the indicative energy targets of the SSAs. He clearly regarded the fact that certain combinations of schemes would exceed those indicative energy targets to be a policy concern.

The inspector and the energy secretary also had to grapple with the potentially important knock-on effect for future applications for grid infrastructure. If all the turbines before the inquiry were permitted, it would have triggered the need for a 400 kilovolt grid connection on pylons, which was also strongly objected to by Powys County Council and others, although the application for that connection was not before the inquiry.

It is unlikely, in light of the recent changes to the renewables subsidy regime, that there will be another onshore wind farm inquiry of this scope, at least until a different political climate emerges.

There is no doubt that the decision-making process took
far too long. However, the inquiry did enable those concerned – for and against – to have their say and test the evidence fully. SJ