Lewis Wind Power Project Manager Claire Jones said, “We are pleased Scottish Ministers have approved the additional consent for the Stornoway Wind Farm under Section 36 of the Electricity Act 1989.
This comes after two rounds of community consultation on the company’s proposals, with public exhibitions at Stornoway Town Hall in October 2018 and February 2019. During these consultations we listened carefully to feedback from local people and consequently made changes to our proposal.
The new consent will give Lewis Wind Power the option of using the very latest onshore wind turbines on the market, which we believe may be necessary to generate power at the cost required to compete for long-term contracts in a government-backed auction taking place this year.”
Contracts are awarded by the Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC) on a competitive basis with onshore wind farms on Scotland’s ‘remote islands’ competing with other less established technologies including floating offshore wind, geothermal and wave power.
This new consented design features up to 24 turbines with a tip height of up to 180m and 9 turbines with a tip height of up to 156m, a total of up to 33 wind turbines. This compares to a maximum of 36 turbines at up to 145m in the project’s earlier consent (from 2012, which was then amended in 2015). The latest consent also increases the separation distance between a number of turbines in the eastern part of the site and the town of Stornoway.
The Environmental Assessment completed to support the application detailed a number of mitigation measures which were embedded in the design of the scheme and controlled through the conditions attached to the consent. Lewis Wind Power look forward to working with stakeholders such as CnES, SEPA and NatureScot to deliver the project.
Claire Jones added “I would like to thank the Stornoway Trust for their support in the development of this project over the last twenty years and the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar for their constructive approach to the planning aspects of this development. The team at Lewis Wind Power will now focus efforts on supporting SSE to build a new electrical link to the island, obtain the other consents needed and further develop the routes to market.”