THE landfall and land corridor earmarked to connect an offshore wind farm to a proposed substation at Fetteresso Forest have been revealed.
Meanwhile a Mearns campaigner’s petition for better consultation on energy infrastructure projects has reached the consideration stage at Holyrood.
Thistle Wind Partners, TWP, have published their scoping document for the Bowdun Offshore Wind Farm. This identifies the landfall, cable corridor and substation options for an approximately 1GW fixed-foundation project located 44km to the east of Stonehaven – as shown below.
According to the scoping document, Benholm is TWP’s preferred site for landfall and they have identified a location for their substation, which may require up to 400m x 600m of land within 2km of Hurlie – and are in discussions with Forestry Land Scotland. The exact route of an underground cable connection is still being established.
TWP will seek feedback from the community with regards to the Bowdun project and will be holding community consultation events in Aberdeenshire between 28th and 30th October 2024. Additional pre-application consultation events, in advance of the submission of a planning application, are also planned for 2025.
Petition now under consideration
Stonehaven and District Community Council are among those who have complained about the quality of SSEN’s public consultation over their proposals to upgrade the transmission infrastructure by building a corridor of 56m pylons.
They echo the concerns of Tracey Smith, who lodged a petition with the Scottish Government calling for measures, ‘to address the concerns of communities about the lack of meaningful, responsible, and robust voluntary and pre-application consultation by transmission operators on energy infrastructure projects‘, has reached the consideration stage.
The Save our Mearns campaigner seems to have already found a supporter in Gillian Martin,
Minister for Climate Action, who in her response states: ”While the current good practice guidance is considered appropriate to most forms of electricity development, the scale and linear nature of transmission development potentially requires a more detailed approach to be set out in guidance. Such development can affect several different communities and have different impacts depending on the different environments a line proposes to pass through, making these the most complex of all onshore Electricity Act applications.”