North Rhins Wind Farm

There are a number of technical constraints that needed to be adhered to at North Rhins, as well as technical issues that needed addressing to determine if a wind farm were practical at the site and to ensure that the design minimized any potential impacts. These included:

• designing the layout of the turbines based on known technical constraints
• a review of potential sources of construction materials
• designing the site track layout and access junctions
• drawings accompanying the planning application, including the turbines, hard-standing requirements and substation/control building layouts.

Local construction resources were used wherever possible, benefitting local businesses and minimizing the amount of construction traffic on the local road network.

In July 2006, we were granted consent to install meteorological masts on the site to record wind speed data. Measuring wind speed is an important part of the technical assessment of the site and allows a more accurate forecast of the potential energy yield of the wind farm to be made.

We adapted our plans as we carried out further work and the design is now more condensed which meant we only installed one of the two met towers we received consent for.