Recent changes to the National Planning Policy Framework will give onshore wind developers and investors the confidence to start looking at new projects in earnest. But nine years of inactivity has bled the industry and the public sector of expertise

England’s population density means large-scale wind farms will be few and far between. Co-located projects hold more potential. There are multiple policy tweaks that could help make such developments more attractive

The right approach to community engagement will be critical. Wind farms can deliver transformational benefits to local areas, but tailoring benefit programmes to the specific needs of a given community is crucial

Restarting activity creates a unified UK market at a time when competition for supply chain capacity is high.

In 2015, the UK government inserted two small footnotes into the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). They required onshore wind development in England to demonstrate zero local opposition, amounting to an effective ban on new projects.

Now – more than nine years later – a new UK government has taken the footnotes out.

Pleasant pastures

The ban is gone, but how much wind will developers actually build on England’s green and pleasant land?

Removing the footnotes effectively places wind on an equal footing with any other development project in England – be they nuclear power stations or sewage plants. But there is more good news. The wind industry had also called for a national target for onshore wind capacity – and now it has one. The Labour government wants the UK to have 30 GW by 2030.

As with so many energy transition targets, this one is going to be very hard to hit. There is over 9.5 GW of onshore wind in Scotland, over 1.2 GW in Wales and around 3.5 GW in England.

The 2030 targets requires a doubling of existing capacity within six years. How much of that additional 15 GW could England provide? Another 3.5 GW, perhaps more? At this stage, industry executives are reluctant to guess.

Planning changes

RenewableUK’s database has around 500 MW of proposed English onshore wind projects. Of this, some 300 MW is at a single very early stage project at Calderdale.

“I’m always trying to temper expectations,” said James Robottom, head of policy at RenewableUK. “It’s not going to be a free-for-all, but it is positive to have developers who are out there saying: we’re up for this.”

English onshore wind projects still cannot apply for a development consent order (DCO), where the central government rather than local authorities approve a “nationally significant” project. But this too is likely to change. On July 8, the government said it would hold consultations on moving onshore wind back under the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) planning regime.

Robottom expects the consultation and associated legal changes to take six to 12 months. But it makes sense for the government to consult rather than simply reinstate onshore wind into the NSIP. Much has changed in the last decade.

For one thing, wind projects and the turbines themselves have grown far larger and more powerful.

Ray onshore Wind Farm, Northumberland © Vattenfall, Peter Skelton KG Photography — *Ray Wind Farm, Northumberland © Vattenfall, Peter Skelton KG Photography*

Little by little

At first glance, a 12 month wait for the NSIP consultation and its outcome looks like a potential drag on efforts to get onshore wind development in England back up and running. But it may not have that much of an impact, simply because the number of onshore wind projects that could qualify as nationally significant is unlikely to be high.

Under the NPPF, onshore projects are considered NSIPs if they are 50 MW or above. As part of the consultation on re-admitting onshore wind to the regime, the appropriateness of the 50 MW figure will be under consideration. It could be left unchanged, it could be raised.

But Robottom doubted it would end up being lowered. The problem is that England – as one of the most densely populated countries in Europe – does not have a lot of suitable locations on which to build a 50 MW wind farm.

“You’d be looking at a 10 to 12 turbine site,” said John Fairlie, managing director of AWRenewables. “These sites are going to be few and far between because of the land area that you’d need. So I’d be surprised if many projects go through that [NSIP] process.”

Ones, twos and threes

There is the potential for existing, older projects to be repowered. England’s onshore wind industry – slightly older than Scotland’s – will start looking at repowering around 2027.

Westminster’s newfound support for onshore wind should help make it easier to repower these sites efficiently. But the scope for actually increasing capacity seems slim.

“We’ve been very careful to say this is not an opportunity to grow this capacity, repowering is important to protect this capacity,” said Robottom.

One challenge inherent to repowering is that it involves replacing older, smaller turbines with newer, much larger ones. The smaller turbines that comprise first generation wind farms are simply no longer available.

If an old site with 25 turbines needs repowering, there will likely be constraints on how many new turbines the site can accommodate. At best, the industry is hoping to use repowering to preserve – not enlarge – the capacity it has built.

Game of turbines

As such, developers see the potential for increasing English onshore wind capacity as being centred around small to medium sites, alongside strategically placed large single-turbines.

“But that would actually suit England quite well, in terms of locating sites near communities,” says Fairlie. There is where England’s population density functions as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.

Single turbine projects might seem uninspiring against the colossal 200-plus turbine projects in Scotland. But Fairlie pointed to a 4.1 MW turbine that AWRenewables put up in January this year. This generates more power than the UK’s first wind farm – the 10 turbine Delabole project built in Cornwall in the early 1990s.

The power of a single modern turbine combined with the ability to connect it to a specific community creates fertile ground for collaboration. By the end of this year, AWRenewables’ 4.1 MW turbine will directly power an adjacent EV service station on the A5 between Dunstable and Milton Keynes.

Detractors who like to point out that EVs are only as clean as the grid power they rely on will have no traction here.

“What we’re trying to do is bring wind closer to people, so we didn’t want any arguments as to where the power was coming from when you plug your car in,” Fairlie said.

Co-located

There is also huge potential to add wind to co-located projects such as energy parks. The benefits of co-location are obvious. Sharing infrastructure and land lowers capital and operational costs.

Securing a grid connection is already a headache for developers. Building a co-located site with a single connection is therefore attractive.

Generating more power per square metre of land makes the project more beneficial and more appealing to local communities. Co-location of wind and solar also improves the efficiency and reliability of the power generated. This makes it closer to the profile of dispatchable fossil fuel sources, at a time when corporate demand for reliable 24/7 green power is soaring.

Developer RidgeWind built multiple wind farms across England between 2003 and 2014. Now operating as Ridge Clean Energy, the firm is focused on projects that combine battery storage with solar and wind power.

Ridge Clean’s proposed Great Oaks Renewable Energy Park project in Cumbria would have 24 MW of solar PV, almost 17 MW of wind and could host up to 20 MW of storage. Marjorie Neasham Glasgow, Ridge Clean Energy’s CEO, said co-location was the best approach to developing onshore wind in England. She pointed to the shortage of land and grid connections, with the need to maximise community support.

AWRenewables’ next site is also a co-located project – comprising a 6.2MW wind turbine, a solar farm, an EV charging station and over 500 new homes. “Our ambition for that site is for that whole new community to be powered by on-site renewables,” says Fairlie. Sites like this can have far more tangible benefits for local communities – linking the wind power directly to consumers.

A loss of expertise

There is far less co-location – just 12% of all installations, according to RenewableUK’s database – than one would expect given the benefits. A recent RenewableUK report on the issue included a laundry list of obstacles that could be removed or at least ameliorated.

This includes the lack of a clear regulatory definition of co-location across network planning, network codes, system operability and market arrangements. RenewableUK also said co-locating projects at distribution level should not be sent to the back of the connection queue if this combination did not alter the need for extra export capacity.

Although the proposed list of policy, regulatory and market improvements is long, developers of co-located projects say the landscape is improving. The grid queue system is being reformed – albeit slowly.

National Grid has changed the way it treats batteries connections to better reflect how the size of connection a storage project will actually need – though this has yet to filter down to the DNO level.

Earlier this year, the government launched a consultation on amending Contracts for Difference (CfDs) for Allocation Round (AR) 7. Under discussion is a change to metering that would make it easier for CfD generators to co-locate with other assets.

Developer Statkraft has noted the existing policy incentives for co-location are typically around shared infrastructure and grid connection.

“If the outcome of the consultation provides for more creative metering arrangements and more transmission distribution, this could help with building a greater number of hybrid schemes,” a Statkraft spokesperson said.

Planning capacity

The RenewableUK report also highlighted the lack of adequate resourcing at planning authorities and related bodies. This is a challenge not just for co-location, but for construction in general.

The new government has pledged to hire 300 new planning officers, but this is set against the loss of more than 3,000 public sector planning officers between 2010 and 2020, according to the Royal Town Planning Institute.

For onshore wind, there is the added challenge that many planning officers in England will have never seen a wind turbine application. Even if some remember them from years past, they will have to refamiliarise themselves with wind-specific issues like ETSU-R-97. This, along with amendments from the Institute of Acoustics, determines how to assess and rate the noise from proposed wind farms.

“There’s going to be a learning curve for councils and statutory consultees to get them up to scratch,” said Fairlie. “I’d say that that’s probably going to be the first issue we’ll have as an industry.”

Similarly, the last nine years of virtual inactivity has seen many developers and environmental consultants focused on onshore wind move on to other things. As the industry looks to restart, this general lack of experience is going to be keenly felt.

Local support

In ramping up onshore wind in England, community buy-in is essential. Nimbyism is rife in the UK. Few projects generate more pushback than wind turbines. Over the course of the government’s nine-year ban, turbines have become far more efficient and powerful. But they are also bigger.

In 2011, the old Delabole wind farm was repowered with new Enercon E-70 turbines. At almost 100 metres from ground to blade tip, these were far larger than the originals. Modern wind turbines now average 200 metres.

Ridge Clean places serious weight on the importance of community engagement, and demonstrating that projects have social and economic benefits. The company has helped redevelop local infrastructure and is developing a climate awards scheme for schools near its projects.

“Community benefit programmes are essential to get the local community more involved in the whole path of a project from the start,” said Glasgow.

These kinds of initiatives are best practice rather than a prerequisite, but experienced onshore wind developers emphasise the industry needs to ensure it wins public trust. Scotland’s onshore wind sector deal, they say, provides a template.

Good practice principles for providing community benefits from onshore energy projects were created in 2014 and last updated in 2019. These suggest that community benefit packages for onshore wind developments should have a value equivalent to £5,000 per installed MW per annum.

Sector deal

The sector deal also calls for engagement as early as possible in a project’s lifecycle. The aim is to “agree a community package that will meet or exceed” the good practice principles. To help improve transparency and reporting, the onshore wind industry and the government are working to develop a standard approach for managing community benefit funds by the end of this year.

“Scotland has done extremely well with the onshore wind sector deal,” said Fairlie. He describes it as a good “two-way” model for England to follow.

The wind industry supplies the country with cheap, green renewable power and community benefits, and in return receives a consenting regime and a planning process that works.

The previous Conservative government had already committed to providing onshore wind community benefit guidance for England. This followed a consultation that made it clear to the government that it needed to clarify the concept of ‘community support’.

Fairlie thinks it would make sense for England to create something like the Scottish sector deal. But the smaller size of English projects means there will have to be a degree of flexibility. These are high capital projects that cost a lot to build. CfD’s are typically only available for larger-scale developments. Fairlie says that there will have to be an appreciation for what kind of benefits a smaller project can realistically provide, while at the same time ensuring those community benefits are tangible.

“There needs to be flexibility in any [community benefit] protocol that does come out to allow us to be clever with what we do,” he said. “So for example, we’re talking to Community Energy Action Groups in our local area who work on energy poverty.”

A deal that fits

Robottom expects the consultation on community benefits in England to retain that £5,000 per MW figure, but says that the emphasis should be on the concept of “equivalent value”.

No two communities are the same. Benefit packages that offer discounts on electricity prices will be appropriate for one area. Schemes to improve energy efficiency may be more suitable for another.

Ultimately, restarting onshore wind in England will not be fast or problem-free. Nor is the volume of capacity it unlocks likely to be a game changer for the UK’s energy transition. However, it does create a single onshore wind market, making the UK more attractive to companies across the supply chain.

This could be particularly important given the smaller size of English projects. “There were only two manufacturers that we could identify who would sell us a large capacity single wind turbine, because they were more interested in large orders,” says Fairlie. “If we can get more consents through, then we can spread those orders across more sites.”

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