Land agreements for existing projects almost always take the form of leases and will always be time-limited and specific to a particular red line boundary. A repowered project will need new agreements reflecting current market norms, the footprint of the new project, any appropriate reuse/upgrade/reconfiguration of existing infrastructure and the combined decommissioning of the old with construction of the new.
Bigger turbines may mean new challenges with site access and along turbine delivery routes. And increased clustering of projects over the lifetime of the original “pathfinder” project may mean new issues of cooperation and consent involving neighbouring projects arise when negotiating the land rights for the new project.
From a planning perspective, such clustering will introduce new cumulative impacts in relation to landscape and visual amenity, noise, wake effects and ecology and will no doubt feature a variety of turbine sizes. However, community support and the opportunity to replace many smaller turbines with fewer larger ones, possibly with some additional battery storage capacity, could be compelling from a planning perspective. And the requirement to consider and assess the whole project – including grid connection – could be easier in the context of repowered projects which will reuse existing infrastructure (albeit subject to upgrade, reconfiguration or extension).
These and other issues relating to the development of the next generation of repowered onshore wind projects will be considered in more detail by our property and planning experts.
