No objection from Highland councillors to wind farm planned for Dava Moor
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Highland councillors have unanimously agreed not to raise an objection to a wind farm planned on the Dava Moor despite 40 objections.
Ourack wind farm proposed 10 kilometres north of Grantown is expected to generate a community benefit fund worth more than £500,000.
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The proposals are for a 105MW 17 turbine wind farm – cut from 18 – with blades up to 180 metres high to tip, a battery energy storage system (BESS) and a control building over a 762 hectare site.
It will also include a substation, 16.7 kilometres of access tracks, three borrow pits, cabling, and off-site road improvements between Castle Grant and Dava Bridge.
Members of the local authority’s South Planning Applications Committee considered the proposal at Inverness headquarters.
The application was made via the Scottish Government’s energy consents unit which means the local authority is largely a statutory consultee with limited powers.
If it raised an objection then it could result in a public local inquiry, but in doing so it would lose the power to apply conditions – which it has done so with this application.
Through conditions, the council has called for the removal of one turbine due to the risk of visual impact as well as getting a say on the design of substation, battery compound, and other buildings.
Grantown Community Council objected over the ‘cumulative visual effect, especially along the historic old road from Strathspey over the Ourack’.
It also cited the ‘impacts of aviation lighting on the area and the traffic and long term visual impact from the access through Grantown and the railway embankment by the West Lodge’.
Other objectors also remained unconvinced with a total four objections being made to the council and further 36 to the energy consents unit concerning the landscape and visual impacts, including aviation lighting.
Their other concerns were outlined as the cumulative effects and effects on the Drynachan, Lochindorb and Dava Moors Special Landscape Area and the Cairngorms National Park.
Some also considered the turbines to be excessive in scale and will be unduly prominent and have an impact on tourism and the Dava Way, the A939, and the Via Regia heritage path, both during construction and operation of the scheme.
Further objections expressed concern about noise, pollution and traffic including through Grantown as well as the feared impact on private water supplies, archaeology, and residential amenity.
Some also worried about the increased fire risks and fears that the “technology is unreliable” – that is almost certainly a reference to the BESS.
Such systems have raised eyebrows lately amid a lack of guidance in Scotland to planning authorities because there are concerns that they are very hard to extinguish if they go on fire.
Finderne Community Council objected as well, stating its concerns as ‘the industrialisation of a relatively natural upland environment’, adding that ‘it is also concerned about land management once an area is leased to a wind farm company and its ability to minimise wildfires’.
