Wind Turbines

Part of Northern Ireland Assembly – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 2:45 pm on 16 April 2012.

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Photo of Alex Attwood Alex Attwood Social Democratic and Labour Party 2:45, 16 April 2012

I concur with the broad sentiment of the question. That is why, last autumn, I instructed the head of planning and our senior management team to conduct training at all divisional levels in the North to ensure that the spike in individual wind turbine applications was managed in an expedient fashion and that we had the capacity and knowledge in each development office to ensure that applications were dealt with in an expedient way. Given the surge in individual applications, I accept the point that there was a need to make up for some lost ground in the management of those applications and to have the skills and capacity in local offices to do that.

Similarly, as there are now over 70 applications for anaerobic digesters in the planning system, we have gathered together in the past number of weeks the major agents making applications on behalf of individual farmers and others to ensure that our planning system is better fit for the challenge of managing AD applications as they roll forward. The same will be true for offshore wind farm applications on the far side of the licensing round. The licensing round will conclude in the autumn, and we need to have the capacity to manage any forthcoming applications, not least because offshore wind is of better quality than onshore wind. However, I have to say to Members that, unless our national grid is sufficiently broad to connect renewable opportunities to the grid, we may have a situation in which planning applications are submitted and approved but opportunities to build do not arise because there is no connection to the national grid. Members will have read in the papers this morning that there may be some further developments this week in that regard.