News / Wind farm grinds through planning system
A SHETLAND community group planning to build a £6 million wind farm on the isle of Yell hope to find out if they can go ahead this month, eight years after they started work on the project.
North Yell Development Company’s plans for a five turbine development generating 4.5 megawatts of power started life in 2003, but have been held up over the past year by delays in the local council’s planning process.
Besieged by major proposals for the 127 turbine Viking Energy wind farm and Total’s £500 million gas plant at Sullom Voe, planning officers with Shetland Islands Council have been struggling to cope.
NYDC submitted an addendum to their original application in July 2010 and should have received a response within eight weeks. Planners asked them to be patient and wait until December, but this week the organisation had still not heard about their application.
On Tuesday SIC development management manager John Holden confirmed the Yell wind farm would come before the SIC’s planning board on 20 April.
He said the application was one of many which had been held back due to the sheer workload facing a planning authority where the economy has been bucking the national trend.
“We have been faced with the challenge of some quite exceptional proposals in terms of their scale and complexity. When you could say that the rest of the country is facing a downturn, we are not seeing that here,” Mr Holden said.
While the planning department has been under huge pressure to process the applications of major importance to the Shetland economy, many projects have been held back – some much longer than the nine months it is taking to deal with the NYDC addendum.
Now the department is setting up a new web-based planning system which will allow applicants to follow their case online, keeping up with every aspect of its progress.
Similar systems operate in most Scottish authorities, freeing staff from dealing with enquiries so they can get on with other work.
However introducing the new system is also taking up staff time and adding to the delays. The deadline for its launch has already slipped from this month to July.
“You have to invest the time to reap the benefit in the future,” Mr Holden said. “Hopefully this new system will be able to get all the old applications out of the way.”
Meanwhile NYDC secretary Andrew Nisbet is hoping the planning board approves the wind farm this month so it can take advantage of the new NINES smart grid network being planned in Shetland by Scottish & Southern Energy.
Having spent £6,000 on a peatslide survey of their site for the addendum, which was carried out by The Forestry Commission, they are hoping they won’t be facing any more bureaucratic hurdles.
“We feel quite annoyed about the delay,” Mr Nisbet said. “It’s not going to hold back the wind farm because we’re still waiting for a grid connection, but we really do need that decision now so if there is a possibility of participating in the ‘smart grid’ we would be ready to go.”
Most of the funding to build the wind farm will be from bank loans. Mr Nisbet said the banks were enthusiastic about the project, but were waiting for planning permission to be granted before making any commitments.
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