Windfarm decision strikes the balance between green energy and wildlife conservation

Guest post by Amy Crossley, RSPB Conservation Officer in the East of England

Ministers announced the decision last week to consent two offshore wind farms off the Norfolk coast that will deliver over one gigawatt of renewable energy; enough to provide clean power to around 730,000 homes each year. The two consented wind farms are known as Race Bank and Dudgeon and will have a combined total of up to 216 turbines. A further project, Docking Shoal, was refused consent as this project posed the greatest collision risk to the internationally important Sandwich tern colonies of the North Norfolk Coast Special Protection Area (SPA). Further considerations in the consents decisions included possible effects on marine mammals and fish from noise generated by pile driving of the turbines. The potential for adverse impacts on the internationally important habitats and birdlife of the Wash Estuary SPA and Special Area of Conservation (SAC) from laying of transmission cables through the Wash estuary for the Race Bank and Docking Shoal projects was also considered material to the decisions.

I have co-ordinated the RSPB’s engagement with these windfarms over the last couple of years, and consider that the decisions strike a difficult balance between the need for clean, green energy and safeguarding wildlife and habitats. The two consented projects will of course make massive cuts in the UK’s carbon footprint. Furthermore, instead of just considering the impact of each of the three schemes separately, Government took the important step of looking at the cumulative impact from all three projects.

The RSPB’s position

The RSPB upheld objections to the planning applications for all three projects on the grounds of such cumulative impacts. The collisions predicted to arise from all wind farms in the ‘Greater Wash’ sea area were predicted to causes losses of hundreds of Sandwich terns a year from the North Norfolk Coast SPA colonies - Great Britain’s largest and longest standing ‘super colony’ of this species. Trying to fit the cables for both Race Bank and Docking Shoal within a corridor through the Wash estuary (alongside those of the existing Lincs offshore wind farm) also risked harm to some of the features European importance supported by the site. These include Sabellaria reefs and saltmarsh habitats, as well as large areas of cockle bed that provide an important food source for the hundreds of thousands of waders and waterfowl that make the estuary one of the most important in Europe for birds.

The RSPB considers that climate changes poses the greatest threat to wildlife and people that we face today and decarbonising the UK’s energy sector will be vital in the fight against dangerous climate change. Switching to renewable sources of energy will be pivotal to achieving this goal. The RSPB is supportive of wind energy projects providing adverse impacts on species and habitats can be avoided through careful siting and design.

How the RSPB engaged in the applications for offshore windfarms in Norfolk

We have been involved in the detailed and complex process of assessing the potential ecological effects of the projects and finding ways to reduce the predicted adverse impacts alongside the developers and the statutory nature conservation advisers Natural England & the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC).  Population modelling and a risk-based approach has been used to determine a threshold of annual collision mortality of Sandwich terns that may be sustained by the North Norfolk colonies that would not result in an unacceptable risk of a serious decline in the population. The RSPB and Natural England and JNCC consistently advocated the application of precaution in deriving this threshold given the uncertainties involved in such modelling. The consents granted for the Race Bank and Dudgeon projects are now subject to the conditions that the type and number of turbines used for both will not exceed 43 and 28 annual collisions of Sandwich terns, respectively, and that placement of turbines for Race Bank will avoid areas likely to be most favoured by foraging Sandwich terns. The RSPB acknowledge and welcome the balance that the decisions have achieved between ensuring that renewable energy from offshore wind projects in the Greater Wash can be maximised without posing an unacceptable risk of harm to the internationally important wildlife and habitats the area supports.

We will continue to work with the developers, regulators and statutory agencies to ensure that the consented projects are delivered in the most environmentally sensitive way and that the  need to verify the predictions about their effects on wildlife and habitats can be met through sound research and monitoring around the construction and operation of the projects. Such monitoring will also be important in helping to improve evidence sharing to inform future decisions in the marine environment, as recognised in Defra’s recent review of the  Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2010 and their implementation of the Birds and Habitats Directives in England. We will also continue to engage with proposals for further wind energy projects in the marine and terrestrial environments, to help ensure renewable energy can be delivered without sacrificing our most important natural heritage assets.