For two very long days on the 4 and 5 of March this year, SAS members and interested members of the public sat on the hard benches in the Court of Session to witness, first hand, the Appeal by Community Windpower Ltd against Scottish Ministers for an Enforcement Notice requiring the provision of replacement and alternative water supplies for 22 private water supplies. These were deemed to be at significant risk from the construction and operation of Sneddon Law windfarm in East Ayrshire.
The Decision of the Court (attached) provides a useful summary of the complex planning history of this windfarm, initially consented in 2012, but which has not yet been built. Sneddon Law windfarm holds a lucrative UK Contract for Difference subsidy, which would currently charge electricity consumers twice the wholesale price of any electricity it produced.
Local residents complained to the Council that unauthorised invasive drilling works on the site by Natural Power Ltd, on behalf of CWP, had commenced in June/July 2017. This was without the required replacement and alternative water supplies being put in place, as per the suspensive planning conditions which had been issued by the Scottish Ministers at Appeal in February 2017. One local resident lost his water supply shortly after this work commenced.
This community’s water supplies had already been badly affected by the construction of the adjacent Whitelee windfarm and some of you may remember ‘the Times’ wrote this up in September 2013. https://scotlandagainstspin.org/2013/09/power-company-knew-residents-water-supply-heavily-polluted-times-2/
East Ayrshire Council imposed an Enforcement and Stop Notice on CWP, Natural Power and others in August 2017. CWP appealed in a judicial review against that Stop Notice and lost. They then submitted a further review to the Inner House of the Court of Session and again lost in November 2017. The Appeal by CWP against the Enforcement Notice was held as a Public Inquiry in April/May 2018 and the Decision, to which this current Appeal relates, was issued in April 2019. The Law Lords definitively rejected all the grounds of appeal by CWP and landowner FIM forestry.
Rather than get on and provide an alternative public water supply to the various properties, which would be accepted by property owners, CWP have instead pursued multiple expensive judicial and appeals procedures to avoid compliance with Planning legislation.
It is now accepted that industrial windfarms will affect groundwater and potentially affect private water supplies in rural locations and there are numerous examples where this has occurred and been documented . There are over 100,000 private water supplies (PWS) in Scotland – relied on by rural people who have no other access to a public water supply. Many people have now had their private water supplies affected by building windfarm infrastructure on their water catchment areas. Scottish water no longer allow turbines to be built on their public water catchment areas, but windfarm developers still behave as if it is morally and environmentally acceptable to destroy private water supplies.
This Appeal Decision makes clear that this developer had not met planning conditions to safeguard water supplies before development commenced and that documents submitted to the Council and the Scottish Government were misleading in that regard.
Without waiting for this Decision, CWP applied to East Ayrshire Council in February 2020, to renew their planning permission for this windfarm, without the need for compliance with any provision for monitoring or mitigation of any of the 22 PWS identified as being at risk in this Appeal. In support of their application, Natural Power (subsidiary of Fred Olsen Ltd) produced a new PWS risk assessment for CWP, which in the absence of any substantial, credible new information since the last risk assessment was conducted in 2016, concluded that all the PWS previously at significant risk are now at negligible risk and hence require no further consideration for monitoring or mitigation during or after the windfarm construction.
That in itself is an extraordinary conclusion!
This Appeal Decision is unprecedented and should serve to highlight the dangers of developing industrial scale projects upon public and private water supply catchment areas in Scotland. East Ayrshire Council should be congratulated for standing up to protect the basic human rights of its citizens.
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