Weston Turbines – Say No

STOP PRESS 23 APRIL 2009

NHDC Planning Control Committee voted unanimously to reject the application following a recommendation by the planning officer to refuse. Further documentation will be posted in due course. It is not known whether the applicant will appeal. Present at the meeting were several local landowners interested in wind farm development on their own land.

This is a great result for members of WARD and the Weston Wind Turbine Working Group following years of hard work and fully vindicates the position we have taken.

The grounds for refusal were mainly related to :-

Harm to, and inappropriate development, on the green belt;

Unacceptable visual impact;

Inadequate acoustic assessment;

Aircraft safety in respect of the airfields at Rush Green and Graveley;

Turbine safety in respect of the proximity to a nearby road and footpath.

The planning officer was also critical of the applicant’s Environmetal Impact Statement including an inadequate assessment of the impact on biodiversity particularly the local bat population.

The Committee went on to discuss, as statutory consultee to Mid Beds Council, an application for a 16 turbine wind farm a few miles north of Weston. There is a considerable danger of the area being overwhelmed by wind farm development and the planning officer in his report is recommending that consideration now be given to constraint mapping in the future as advised by PPS22.  He said  “….it would now seem doubtful that there is a significant capacity for the scale of technology being proposed here.”