Like many people watching BBC1’s “The One Show” on Wednesday we were horrified by the case of a giant wind turbine (80m hub height, 125m to blade tip) sighted less than 70m from a residential property. The report quite rightly highlighted problems caused by noise, shadow flicker and even large chunks of ice falling from blades during winter.
This kind of development casts a long shadow over the entire wind industry and strengthens our belief that mid-size wind turbines are a much better solution. Worse still, backlash in the form of overly restrictive planning guidelines could set the industry back decades. All developers should sit back and think… “what if that was my house?”
Turbines installed by DistGen will typically be:
- less than 50m tall (hub height)
- 300m or further from nearest properties
- partially or wholly community operated