By John Colombi and Jessica Knowles in our wind farm development team

Repowering an existing wind farm isn’t as easy as it sounds. While it may be more straightforward than starting from scratch, it comes with its own delightful and unique issues! However, it’s been an incredible learning experience ...

After some technical stuff figuring out what we could do with the site, how much renewable energy we could generate, and conversations with the planners and statutory consultees, we decided to throw a party and share our plans with the public.

So in August 2007 we held a drinks party the evening before our annual Delabole Wind Fair to introduce the project and ask the locals what they thought. We showed them a couple of different site layouts so that they could let us know what they preferred: fewer, larger turbines, or smaller turbines but more of them.

Many interesting conversations and debates later, we tallied up the results and found that the vast majority of those who attended the evening preferred bigger turbines but fewer of them. With this, and lots of other useful feedback, we finalised our planning application and again invited people to come and have a look at the plans we would be submitting to the council. We had a good turnout (despite holding the exhibition in a chilly church in February) and a predominantly positive response.

The application first went to committee in October 2008. After a year of hard work this was the most important milestone so far. Unfortunately the application was deferred from this meeting to a later date. Luckily it wasn’t a major point. With the application we had decided to provide a few more photos of what the site would look like in addition to the ones that were initially required. These photos had not been in the public domain for the required amount of time, so a bit of an anti climax but not a disaster. 

We hotfooted it back to the office to make sure the photomontages were where they needed to be and waited for the committee date to be announced by the council.

Two months later we were back at the council offices listening to the planning committee discuss the application with our fingers tightly crossed.
 
As it turned out, we needn’t have worried as all but one of the councillors voted to approve the application, one abstaining. Just nine months to get through planning for a wind farm development is pretty good going, given the horror stories we hear about projects getting stuck in the planning process for years on end, so we were pretty chuffed! We celebrated in the Good Energy way – at a nearby pub with local beer and great organic food. But we were back in the office the following day to crack on with raising the finance to get the project built! 

After planning, we brought on experienced consultants at Project Management Support Services (PMSS) to work with us on getting all of the contracts, site surveys, planning bits and pieces etc in place so that the bank would be satisfied that our project was airtight and lend us the balance of funds we needed to build it.

The next stage was talking to turbine suppliers to see which turbines would be best for the site and give us the most electricity. During the pre-planning work we had shot a laser up from the site (no, really) to measure what the wind was doing, and Natural Power Consultants used this along with the many years of operational data we had from the existing wind farm to tell us how much energy the new site was likely to produce from a bunch of different turbine choices.

The winners come from Enercon, whose turbines look set to produce 25,800 MWh of renewable electricity each year, with the greatest Co2 savings. They are also the smallest of the turbines we were looking at  installing (they have a tip height of less than 100m – planning allowed for 110m). PMSS also helped us pick Raymond Brown Construction as the Balance of Plant contractor who would build the tracks and foundations, and more great news came through -  the Coop bank agreed to lend us the money.

While all this was going on there were plenty of trips to Cornwall for chats with the planning department, landowners and locals to keep everyone updated with the progress of the project and make sure all the paperwork was in place. (When you want to borrow almost £10m, the Coop needed to be sure that all paperwork is present and correct!). After lots of running around drafting, re drafting, signing, scanning, and sending paper work, the end was in sight. As was Christmas.

Of course everyone involved wanted to close the deal before Christmas so that we’d have another excuse to overindulge. As the days of December ticked away, we stuck a colourful spreadsheet next to an advent calendar, showing the number of working days left to get this done before Christmas!

All was on course, everything was pretty much in place, and pens were poised to sign the deal. Then it snowed. A lot. All the time. Everywhere. So we found ourselves ready to complete, but with people simply unable get to where they needed to be to do it! Still, with the bulk of the work done we collectively exhaled, turned off our email and headed home for Christmas. And on the 8th January 2010, we completed. Shame we were all detoxing after Christmas or it could’ve been quite a party.....