What do the government’s new onshore windfarm rules actually mean?
The government today announced new planning rules that could significantly limit where onshore windfarms can be built.
The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) say the aim is to give people more of a say over whether or not to have a windfarm near their communities. But critics claim the new rules could curb the development of the UK’s onshore wind industry, with knock-on effects for meeting the UK’s renewable energy targets.
Renewable energy targets
The UK is legally required to provide 15 per cent of the UK’s energy demand from renewable sources by 2020. The government’s renewable energy roadmap outlines plans for 13 gigawatts of onshore wind capacity by 2020 to help meet this goal. There is currently about 6 gigawatts installed.
DCLG’s new guidance will mean local communities are consulted at an earlier stage of the planning process, and on a greater range of windfarm projects. At the moment, the public is only consulted on “nationally significant” projects. The new rules will give communities more of an opportunity to veto projects.
Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) polling recently found just 13 per cent of people oppose onshore wind developments, while 68 per cent support more onshore wind.
But local opposition to wind farms can be vociferous, and the public aren’t the only ones that energy companies will need to win over. DCLG’s new guidance will also give local councils more scope to reject projects on the basis of environmental or social costs.
Local government is currently required to “encourage the use of renewable resources” under the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). DCLG’s new rules ‘support’ the NPPF and won’t override it, but will provide more scope for local councils to reject applications.
The UK is already about halfway to reaching it’s onshore wind roadmap target, with a further 12 gigawatts of onshore wind projects awaiting construction or in the planning stages. If all those projects are built the UK would easily pass its roadmap target – but it is very unlikely all the projects will be completed.
The new rules mean local governments can make it harder for new projects to be built in the future. But onshore wind is one of the cheaper renewable energy sources, so blocking windfarm developments would almost certainly make hitting the UK’s renewable energy targets more costly.
Reducing household energy bills
The DCLG is asking energy companies to offer payments five times greater than communities currently get in exchange for agreeing to the windfarms.
Local communities could receive £5000 per megawatt of installed capacity each year, up from £1000. DECC says this means households near the developments could get the equivalent of a £400 reduction on their energy bills each year.
But it very much depends on the size of the windfarm and how the ‘local community’ is defined, a DECC spokesperson tells us.
DECC’s calculation is based on a mid-sized 20 megawatt windfarm located in a community of about 250 households. It calculates the £400 figure by dividing the total payout amount – £100,000 per year – evenly between the households.
It won’t become clear how close households will have to be to a windfarm to receive the payments until DCLG publishes its full guidance.
Trade association Renewables UK says the payment increase could have serious knock-on effects for the industry. Chief executive, Maria McCaffery, said in a press release:
“following the Government’s advice that we should pay substantially more into community funds for future projects, will unfortunately make some planned wind energy developments uneconomic in England, so they will not go ahead and that is very disappointing”.
So while local communities stand to gain from DCLG’s greater financial incentives, energy companies may not be able to afford to build the windfarms being at all. The industry says this could mean losing the local benefit and curbing the growth of the UK’s onshore wind industry.
Why the new rules?
The chief executive of trade association the Renewable Energy Association, Gaynor Hartnell, told the Today programme her “prime concern is the motivation behind the proposal”.
The new rules could be interpreted as evidence the government is moving away from wind as a low carbon energy option. Earlier this week, the controversial energy bill was pushed through parliament without a decarbonisation target and with financial incentives for new nuclear intact.
Energy Secretary Ed Davey said in a press release that the government:
“remain committed to the deployment of appropriately sited onshore wind, as a key part of a diverse, low-carbon and secure energy mix”.
But until DCLG publishes the full guidance and communities start to act on the rules it is hard to gauge the full impact what look like sizeable new obstacles for onshore wind.