TOFT HILL

TOFT HILL APPEAL LODGED

NPOWER HAVE LODGED AN APPEAL AGAINST THE REFUSAL OF PLANNING PERMISSION FOR THE TOFT HILL PROPOSAL (26 JUNE 2008).

Details can be seen on the Toft Hill page on the Planning Inspectorate website (DPEA Appeal Ref. No. APP/V2913/A/08/2077474). You can make representations online or in writing. There is a link to the online comment facility at the bottom of the Case Summary page.

REPRESENTATIONS (Deadline is 3 September 2008).

If you have previously objected to the Toft Hill application, you should have received a letter from Berwick Borough Council regarding the appeal process and how you can make further representations to the Planning Inspector.

The Toft Hill Proposal

NPower Renewables are proposing to build seven 367 ft (112 metre) turbines on the Toft Hill site, a small area of land on a large estate owned by an absentee landlord who lives in Dorset.

The site is less than half the acreage of the 'Moorsyde' site and is bounded by settlements at Shellacres, Grindon Rigg, Grindon and by a fast section of the A698. It is close to the scheduled ancient monument of Duddo Five Stones.

The Toft Hill site is less than 2 miles (3 km) from the 'Moorsyde' site:

Visual Impacts

While NPower adopted a different approach to Your Energy Limited, by following planning guidelines on consultation before finalising their proposal, their array of 362 ft. turbines would have the same adverse visual impacts on our landscape and the same damaging effects on local communities and the local economy.

View to Shellacres & Cheviots, W. Edge of Toft Hill Site
(Taken with 6x7 cm. SLR camera using wide angle, 55mm f/4 lens).
© 2001 Don Brownlow Photography.

NPower, like other developers in the area, are studiously ignoring adjacent applications and have stated to us that their focus is purely on maximising the number of turbines they might get away with on this site. They also submitted their planning application before applying for permission to erect an anemometer mast to measure the wind resource. It used to be thought politic to monitor the wind resource before a planning application was submitted.

It seems that wind developers are rushing to get as many applications as possible approved before the gravy train comes off the rails due to political climate change or the start of the banding scheme for the Renewables Obligation subsidy.

Following on from the Energy Review, Government has been consulting on the introduction of the ‘banded’ RO scheme which would offer a higher reward to higher value technologies and which would downrate onshore wind. The Government admits that, “As a technology-neutral instrument, the Renewables Obligation has thus far proved less successful in bringing forward development of the more emerging renewable technologies.” In other words it has resulted in the present Klondike windrush because onshore wind is the cheapest and easiest technology to develop, even though it is of lowest value both in terms of carbon saving and security of supply.

Ofgem calculated in 2007 that, since the obligation was introduced in 2002, customers have been overcharged by £740m and that saving one tonne of carbon through the RO costs up to eight times as much as under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. The National Audit Office reported that onshore wind developers were being paid at least twice what was needed to develop onshore sites in 2005 (the rate of return has actually increased since then). This excess (and the huge cost of uprating the grid to cope with erratic and unstable supplies of wind energy) is being paid for in the electricity tariff.

In order not to upset the industry, the Government intends maintaining the present regime for schemes which are in production by 2009. The present subsidy is so generous that (as Your Energy Ltd have openly admitted in their ‘ Moorsyde’ brochure) wind resource is a secondary matter in finding sites. ¹

NPower admit in the small print of their 'Wind Power News' flier for Toft Hill that they are working on a capacity factor of only 21% for the site. This is in line with the very poor capacity factor of just over 22% that Your Energy have claimed for ‘Moorsyde’. To put this in context, the British Wind Energy Association claims a ‘typical’ capacity factor of 30%. The DTI has published recorded figures for 1998-2004 which showed that the North East has the lowest capacity factor in the country, at 21%.

The Toft Hill scheme would totally dominate Duddo Five Stones, a Scheduled Ancient Monument of national importance which has been described as, "... undoubtedly the most complete and dramatically situated" [of Northumbrian stone circles]. ² Duddo Tower (SAM & Grade II listing) would also be adversely affected.

Duddo Five Stones, Stone Circle, Looking SW to Cheviots

(Taken with 6x7 cm. SLR camera using wide angle, 55mm f/4 lens)
© 2005 Don Brownlow Photography.

A power station development such as this, while making a negligible contribution to secure power production and even less to carbon saving, would have a major impact on views to the Cheviots from the A698 which is the major tourist route between Berwick and Coldstream. It would also have major visual impacts on the Tweed valley and the National Park.

There is also a problem with the proximity of this turbine array to settlements. Whereas NPower's previous proposal for 12 turbines on this site would have resulted in numbers of houses being well within the industry's so-called 'accepted, working, separation distance' of 750m, the revised proposal still places turbines within 1.5 km of housing - the Scottish Executive (SPPG 6) suggests that a 1.5 km separation distance for large schemes (20MW plus).³ The DTI has yet to modernise a 450m separation distance guideline from the mid 1990's when turbines were less than half the size of current models.

The UK Noise Association has also recently published a report which suggests that wind power stations should not be built within 1 mile of dwellings.⁴ The flawed ETSU-R-97 guidelines on turbine noise were originally designed more for the convenience of the industry than to protect householders.

NPOWER HIRES SOUTHERN ACTIVISTS TO STUFF THE RESPONSE FILES

NPower have used eco-activists from Southern England and Wales to stuff the response files with pre-written letters expressing support for the Toft Hill scheme.

Only weeks before the planning meeting, on 27 and 28 February 2008, two activists were collecting signatures in Berwick. Their table, obstructing half the pavement outside a charity shop in Marygate, displayed a small part of NPower’s Toft Hill Environmental Statement. In conversation, they admitted that they were being paid by NPower to collect signatures. They were unwilling to give their full names and were remarkably camera shy for people who are usually trying to get pictures of their publicity stunts into the press. During the 45 minutes I was present, they did not once mention to people they were approaching that NPower were paying for them to collect signatures. Nor did the stall or the pre-written letter they were using bear the name of NPower or any other organisation (see below).

Stall with NPower’s ES documents, Berwick, 27 February 2008.

This is a dishonest way to operate, in our opinion. When members of MAG collected signatures for a petition, we identified ourselves to people with our full names and told them directly that we were collecting signatures for MAG's campaign. All our forms had MAG’s name and contact details on them.

Npower, when contacted by the press, issued a statement claiming that the stall was being run by an organisation called ‘Alliance4Wind’. We googled the name and got the following result: “Your search - Alliance4Wind - did not match any documents.” Very strange - an invisible activist group!

NPower‘s biggest fans

A quick bit of research on the internet revealed that one of the signature gatherers is Jonathan Lincoln, founder of the Welsh ‘Sustainable Energy Alliance’, one of myriad small groups of eco-activists. He was listed as a Greenpeace organiser in Porthmadog, North Wales in 2006. The SEA website gives a list of the wind power projects that they support; these are: Gwynt-Y-Mor, Lindhurst (nr. Mansfield), Langham and Rhyl Flats. These are all NPower proposals.

However, it does seem that Jonathan's group is now accepting commissions to operate on behalf of other developers, a recent press report identifies SEA as operating on behalf of Infinergy, which plans to build 10 huge turbines north of Grantham: “The firm pays the expenses of members of the Sustainable Energy Alliance when they visit the Grantham area to lobby for the proposed wind farm at Thackson's Well, near Long Bennington.” The Grantham Journal quotes an Infinergy spokeswoman as saying: “The activity is done by SEA and not by Infinergy.” An interesting distinction!

SEA’s informative style of debate on renewables issues is typified by its T-shirts:

SEA T-shirt.

Misleading the public.

NPower’s dodgy support letter.

Nearly every bullet point in this document is misleading.

Nuclear nonsense.

The pre-written letter being used by Jonathan and his friend contains the usual misleading stuff about nuclear power. It clearly implies that wind is “an alternative” to nuclear power generation. Even Jonathan Lincoln admits in conversation that wind is not a base-load power generator and therefore can not substitute for nuclear power generation. The most rabidly pro-wind report to date, which is invariably referenced by the BWEA, Greenpeace and FOE, states: “It would be unrealistic to assume that wind energy would displace any nuclear capacity,” ('Wind Power in the UK', Sustainable Development Commission. 2005. p35).

Jonathan admitted in conversation that he knew that Denmark, the world's most intensive wind power producer, actually produces more energy from biomass than it does from wind (75% of the country's renewable energy production) so the first statement is doubly misleading.

Electricity Needs

The 'electricity needs' of homes are met by base load power generation from thermal power stations, not from intermittent and erratic wind power generation that seldom follows demand. Wind power generation is not figured into supply calculations by power supply companies, because it can't be counted on to deliver when needed.

The American Wind Energy Association is more honest than our trade body: “You really don't count on wind energy as capacity. It is different from other technologies because it can't be dispatched,” (Christine Real de Azua, Assistant Director of Communications, American Wind Energy Association).

“... load-serving entities know not to count on the full nameplate capacity of a plant, said a market participant who trades primarily in California markets, ‘Wind doesn't help from a keep-the-lights-on-perspective,’ the source said.” (Platts Power Markets Week, 29 August, 2006. See the Windpower Page for more detail of the wind power problem in the real world).

Emissions savings

NPower claim that the Toft Hill power station would displace 27,400 tonnes of CO₂ per year (Environmental Statement, based on 7 x 2MW turbines). Sounds impressive.

But, NPower's figures are based on a discredited substitution rate of 860g/kWh, which assumes that wind only displaces coal-fired electricity. Ofgem, BERR, Carbon Trust and, recently, the ASA all agree that a grid average figure of 430g/kWh must be used, halving NPower’s claimed savings at a stroke.

NPower also use an “assumed” capacity factor for Toft Hill of 26%. This is absurdly high.

NPower had not recorded any wind figures for the site when they submitted their application and stated in a Toft Hill newsletter that they were working on a baseline figure from meteorological records of 21%. By comparison, the modern 100 metre high Crystal Rig turbines that we can see 30 kilometres to the north of the ‘Moorsyde’ site are on a windswept, unpopulated moor in the Lammermuirs that is 150 metres higher than the Toft Hill site. Operating without any of the output restrictions that might be necessary to stop the Toft Hill turbines breaking noise limits, they recorded a capacity factor of just 25.2% in 2006.

So, even ignoring the wildly optimistic capacity factor, we are left with an adjusted figure of 13,700 tonnes of CO₂ that would supposedly be saved every year. Still impressive? Well, ecological experts tell us that a return daily transatlantic jet flight emits 520,000 tonnes equivalent per annum. So Toft Hill would, in theory, save 2.6% of the emissions of a single jet. All well and good, you might say, surely this is a contribution to saving carbon emissions?

There is an additional problem - significant numbers of wind turbines need power stations running as back up for their intermittent and erratic power production. It is not possible to switch coal-fired furnaces off and on at the flick of a switch. So they are kept burning and their turbines are not coupled in until needed. So, while it is true that wind power substitutes for some power production, it is not true to claim that wind powered electricity production saves emissions on a direct substitution basis. According to the National Grid, it is likely that the UK would need at least 65-75% backup for wind power stations.

In Germany, huge numbers of turbines (now over 20,000) have had little effect on carbon emissions due to the high level of backup required. E.On Netz operate the grid in the part of Germany with the highest concentration of wind power production; they state:

“Wind energy is only able to replace traditional power stations to a limited extent.

“Their dependence on the prevailing wind conditions means that wind power has a limited load factor even when technically available. It is not possible to guarantee its use for the continual cover of electricity consumption. Consequently, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90% of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently online in order to guarantee power supply at all times.” [Our emphasis].
(E.On Netz, Wind Report 2005, p. 4)

So, if you actually analyse the figures, it seems that Toft Hill might, optimistically, save the equivalent of 0.5% of the emissions of a single transatlantic jet. You might think this is hardly evidence of a significant contribution to “slowing climate change”!

Local employment

We have already seen the damaging effects of the Toft Hill, ‘Moorsyde’ and Barmoor proposals on investment in tourist enterprises in the area. There has been a similar negative effect on property prices. The only local employment that “may” be provided is a few days haulage and groundwork or fencing. Even this is unlikely, as regional or national contractors usually get most of this work.

The idea that the Toft Hill power station would boost the rural economy is, frankly, insulting.