Untapped Power

Quantifying the wind power lost from National Policy and National Parks

Nicholas Waldron

The Project

Larger wind turbines are banned from National Parks due to local and national policy. These involve good reasons such as maintaining the cultural beauty of the landscape, providing a retreat from urban industrialisation, and protecting sensitive or valuable ecologies.

Particularly in conjunction with areas of outstanding natural beauty, substantial land is taken up in the UK by these areas. Suitable areas for turbine development are becoming ever more limited as our need to develop renewable energy increases.

The areas around national parks are also becoming increasingly questioned for turbine suitability due to visibility from within park borders. As more turbines are built this could become increasingly problematic as cumulative effects mount.

This paper seeks to quantify the effects of protecting these landscapes from wind turbines.

The Process

In order to ensure the project could be completed in reasonable time, the Lake District was chosen as a case study to provide an analogy to the wider national context.

Three main steps were developed to reach an answer.

· Identifying areas suitable for building turbines

· Estimate the power that would be produced at each location

· A brief assessment of theoretical visibility of some of these identified sites, existing sites and areas in and around the national park where turbines might be visible from key viewpoints within the Lake District.

A set of criteria was developed to find sites suitable for turbine development under social and environmental restrictions. By no means a set of criteria that would guarantee planning permission, they represent the best chance of being appropriately positioned under the most important considerations from various authorities.

From a raster of power, polygons containing the total power, power per turbine and number of turbines were created within these suitable areas, now accounting for wind speed and terrain slope.

A true visual impact assessment would be a project in itself, as a multitude of methods is typically employed. This project uses a Zone of Theoretical Visibility (ZTV) analysis to do a brief assessment of areas that could be of concern for wind farm development.

Results

Table 1 - Summary of Final Values
Regions of Potential sites and Turbine Sizes			Mean Annual Power (kW)	Annual Productivity (kWh y^-1)	Equivalent Carbon Emissions (kgCO2e)	Carbon Emissions
Lake District 100m turbines	100m		600,000 ± 100,000	5.3 ± 0.9 x10^9	2.3 ± 0.4 x10^9	100% of Lake District’s annual carbon emissions
	50m		700,000 ± 100,000	6.1 ± 0.9 x10^9	2.7 ± 0.4 x10^9	117% of Lake District’s annual carbon emissions
Lake District 30km buffer zone	100m Diameter		2,600,000 ± 600,000	2.3 ± 0.5 x10^10	1.0 ± 0.2 x10^10
	50m Diameter		2,500,000 ± 500,000	2.2 ± 0.4 x10^10	9.8 ± 2.0 x10^9
Lake District sites covering Domestic Electricity			24,000 ± 3000	2.1 ± 0.3x10^8	9.37 ± 0.12 x10^8	4% of total Lake District’s carbon emissions
Hidden from Lake District View Points		Lake District	340,000 ± 70,000	3.0 ± 0.6 x10^9	1.3 ± 0.3 x10^9	57% of total Lake District Emissions
		Lake District 30km buffer	1,700,000 ± 400,000	1.4 ± 0.4 x10^10	6.44 ± 0.16 x10^10

Table 1 above shows a summary of the key results from the paper and the map to the left shows potential sites.

There is a lot of energy in and around the Lake District. A commissioned study by small world (2010) has quantified the carbon budgets of the park. Just 15 turbines of 100m diameter in the best wind sites would supply all the electricity demand of residents in the park.

There are areas in the park where turbines could be built with little visual influence, compared to existing turbines nearby. However, any development would inevitably be highly visible somewhere. The Lake District viewpoints are easily avoided, however.

Within 30km of the Lake District, the distance visual effects are still considered significant for turbines 100m or taller, is substantial quantities of energy. Roughly half of this is invisible to viewpoints in the Lake District. Should demand in this area exceed 1,700 MW then areas that do not strongly interact with the park visually will become difficult to come by.

None of these answers regarding visibility are intended to suggest whether turbines would be considered intrusive in some way by locals, as the reasons for these are complex. However visibility is a key element in this. The map to the right shows an example ZTV.

Data

Ordnance Survey Strategi (2014)

Ordnance Survey Terrain 50 (2014)

Natural England Sites of Special Scientific Interest (2002)

Department for Energy and Climate Change NOABL Wind Speed Database (1998)

Software

QGIS
QGIS Development Team (2014) QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project.

Open Wind
Open wind (2014) AWS Truepower.

Key References

Hau, E. (2013) Wind Turbines: Fundamentals, Technologies, Application, Economics, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Springer.

Natural England (2010) Making Space for Renewable Energy: Assessing On-Shore Wind Energy Development, Natural England.

Small World (2010) A Carbon Budget for the Lake District National Park, Small World Consulting Limited, final report.

Taylor, D. (2012) ‘Wind Energy’, in G. Boyle (ed.) Renewable Energy: Power for a Sustainable Future, 3rd ed, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 297-362.

University of Newcastle (2002) Visual Assessment of Windfarms Best Practice, Scottish Natural Heritage Commissioned report F01AA303A.