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Tom nan Clach Wind Farm Repowering Environmental Statement August 2015 No Tom nan Clach Wind Farm Repowering Environmental Statement 1. Introduction 1.1 Introduction 1.1.1 This Environmental Statement (ES) has been prepared on behalf of Nanclach Limited (hereafter referred to as the Applicant), to support an application to repower a permitted 17 turbine wind farm known as the Tom nan Clach wind farm (hereafter referred to as the ‘Permitted Scheme’) located at the hill of Tom nan Clach, north-east of Tomatin in Nairnshire, which lies within the administrative boundary of The Highland Council in Scotland (refer to Figure 1.1). The repowering application described in this ES is for an optimised 13 turbine development, to be known as the Tom nan Clach Wind Farm Repowering (hereafter referred to as ‘the Proposed Development’) which will be located at the site of the previously Permitted Scheme. 1.1.2 The applicant is seeking planning permission from The Highland Council (THC) under the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 (as amended) to construct and operate the Proposed Development as described in this ES. 1.2 The Applicant 1.2.1 The Applicant is the formal entity of a joint venture agreement between Infinergy Limited (a renewable energy developer) and Rt Hon. Earl Cawdor (the land owner). The Applicant secured planning permission for the Permitted Scheme at the site in 2013. As such, the Applicant has extensive knowledge of the site and its capacity to support development of the type and scale proposed. 1.2.2 Nanclach Limited has been set up to: • progress the Proposed Development described in this ES; and to • develop the Permitted Scheme, should the planning permission not be granted for the Proposed Development. 1.2.3 The Applicant has commissioned Infinergy Limited, as an expert in wind farm development, to design and submit the required application to support the Proposed Development. 1.3 Background The Permitted Scheme 1.3.1 The Proposed Development is the outcome of a review of the existing planning permission for the Permitted Scheme, which was issued, following appeal to the Scottish Ministers in 2013, to build and operate a 17 turbine wind farm at the site (refer to Figure 1.2). 1.3.2 The letter granting planning permission provides a brief description of the Permitted Scheme as follows (refer to Appendix 1.1 for the full letter): “...the Scottish Ministers hereby uphold the appeal and grant planning permission for the construction of a wind farm comprising 17 wind turbines with a maximum blade tip height above ground level of 110 m, associated access tracks and infrastructure, 2 temporary construction compounds and 2 temporary Introduction 1-1 August 2015 Volume 1: Written Text Tom nan Clach Wind Farm Repowering Environmental Statement borrow workings; approximately 8 km North East of Tomatin, subject to the conditions set out in the Annex to this letter”. 1.3.3 A review of the Permitted Scheme described above was primarily conducted as a consequence of the time that had elapsed since the application for the Permitted Scheme was designed and submitted in June 2009, in combination with the fact that a connection to the national grid, necessary to support the transmission of electricity from the site, could not be provided by the local network operator (Scottish and Southern Energy Power Distribution, the District Network Operator) until the end of 2018. Site Optimisation 1.3.4 Since the original application for the Permitted Scheme, over six years ago, wind turbine technology has evolved significantly, largely due to improvements in turbine energy conversion technology, paired with larger rotors, set on higher towers. As a consequence, technology that was considered innovative in 2009, has now been superseded by new technology that enables significantly more energy to be harvested from a given wind resource. The original design of the Permitted Scheme was based on candidate turbines with a maximum generation capacity of 2.3 MW. Today, turbines with a capacity of at least 3 MW would be considered more appropriate for the wind regime at the site. 1.3.5 In addition, as experience of operational sites has increased, design principals in relation to the optimal layout of a wind farm have also advanced, resulting in further improvements in potential energy yield. 1.3.6 Optimisation studies based on the Proposed Development site’s excellent wind resource, local topography, and current wind turbine technology, found that contemporary turbines in combination with a revised layout would significantly increase electricity output at the site and therefore materially increase environmental benefits compared to the Permitted Scheme. In addition, to ensure that the Proposed Development would remain acceptable in planning terms, the salient planning issues identified through the Public Inquiry into the Permitted Scheme were used to inform the design. 1.3.7 As a result of the above, a scoping request for a 33 turbine wind farm was submitted to the Scottish Minister’s Energy Consents and Deployment Unit (ECDU) in July 2014, in line with the Electricity Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Scotland) (EIA) Regulations 2000 (Appendix 1.2). However, in response to consultees through the scoping process (August through December 2014), and feedback provided at pre application meetings with THC, it was apparent that consultees and THC would like the final design to be more proportional in scale to the Permitted Scheme. As a consequence, the Applicant reduced the overall scale of the development to 13 turbines, broadly within the existing footprint of the Permitted Scheme. At the same time, the design was optimised to ensure that the Proposed Development would maximise environmental benefits by optimising energy yield at the site, whilst ensuring that environmental effects remain acceptable and, at the very minimum, in line with the overall predicted effects associated with the Permitted Scheme. 1.3.8 Further, shortly after the scoping submission, the UK Government released details of the new market support mechanism ‘Contacts for Difference’ (CfD) Introduction 1-2 August 2015 Volume 1: Written Text Tom nan Clach Wind Farm Repowering Environmental Statement under which any wind energy development at the site would operate (CfD comes into effect in 2017). As a consequence of this, the Applicant determined that the optimised development would need to match the generation capacity of the original Permitted Scheme. 1.3.9 The Proposed Development has therefore been designed as a result of the optimisation review, the Applicant’s response to the scoping process in combination with the constraints presented by the requirements of the new CfD scheme. The optimised design of the Proposed Development reduces the number of turbines to 13, while it is predicted to deliver an increase in renewable energy generation of over 26 % compared to the original Permitted Scheme. 1.3.10 Full details of this design evolution process are provided in Chapter 2. The Proposed Development 1.3.11 The Proposed Development has been classified as a ‘repowering’. In this context, ‘repowering’ refers to a power plant in general and includes all measures which improve efficiency and capacity by means of retrofit to the latest technology (2015, Inensus). In short, the Proposed Development is a repowering project because it entails a complete redesign of the Permitted Scheme to ensure that the generation potential of the site is optimised and a ‘best-in-class’ design is achieved. 1.3.12 As such, a new planning application (including an EIA) is required so that the Proposed Development can be determined by THC under the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 (as amended). 1.3.13 The Proposed Development will comprise: • 13 wind turbines up to a maximum tip height of 125 m, giving a combined site generation capacity of up to 39 MW as well as associated infrastructure (foundations, external transformers and crane hardstandings); • approximately 18 km of new permanent access tracks nominally 5 m wide, including seven new water crossings; • a substation compound, approximately 170 m by 80 m, comprising an electrical substation and control building; • a temporary construction compound, approximately 210 m by 115 m, for site office, welfare facilities and material laydown area; • an 80 m metrological monitoring mast; and • three on-site borrow workings/quarries. 1.3.14 Full details of the Proposed Development are provided in Chapter 3 and are shown on Figure 1.3. 1.4 Site Description 1.4.1 The site under consideration comprises largely of open upland moorland habitat with patchy areas of sphagnum bog and intermittent ancient woodland remains. To the immediate north and north-west of the site, the land slopes steeply down towards the River Findhorn, which carves a prominent incision into the Introduction 1-3 August 2015 Volume 1: Written Text Tom nan Clach Wind Farm Repowering Environmental Statement surrounding hills. A number of minor watercourses cross the site, including sections of Allt an t-Slugain Mhoir and Rhilean Burn. 1.4.2 The elevation of the site ranges from approximately 270 m to 550 m above ordnance datum (AOD) and is centred on grid reference 286401 (eastings) 835189 (northings) occupying an approximate area of 7 km 2. 1.4.3 The site is located within the Cawdor Estate and the Lethen Estate and is shown in Figure 1.1. The site boundary lies approximately 7.2 km to the north-east of the nearest settlement, Tomatin and approximately 1.8 km south of Daless, between the A9 and the B9007. The site is located within parts of the Nairn and Inverness South multi member wards of THC. Adjacent wards are Culloden & Ardersier and Badenoch & Strathspey. No buildings or structures, with the exception of two wooden huts, are present on the site.

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