BEIS Committee calls for rethink of onshore wind planning

Ministers have been urged to consider stripping local councils of powers to block onshore wind projects as part of a wider push to prioritise climate change in the energy planning system by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee.

The committee’s scrutiny report of the government’s draft energy national policy statement (NPS) recommended that it should look into reinstating onshore wind farms as nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs).

New onshore wind was removed from the NSIP planning regime by the government in 2016, leaving applications to be determined by local planning authorities.

However, the committee concluded that onshore wind is a “significant source” of clean power and a “key part” of the energy mix required to cut UK emissions to net zero by 2050.

Given that the NPS is being reviewed in order to bring the planning framework in line with the policies set out in the government’s energy white paper, the committee recommended that ministers consider reincluding onshore wind within the NSIP planning regime when the document is finalised.

Overall, the committee said the revised NPS needs to place greater emphasis on the impact of climate change and the speed at which new infrastructure will need to be built to meet the government’s net zero target.

The NPS must “unambiguously” express that the prime consideration, when weighing planning consent for NSIPs for renewable energy, is the overall contribution they make to mitigating climate change and reducing emissions.

The current draft of the NPS does not provide the “step change”, which is needed to deliver the required scale of new NSIPs at a sufficiently rapid pace, “largely due to ambiguity” about the relative weight of climate change relative to the local impacts of developments that have to be taken into account in the planning decision-making process.

The government should clarify this by stating that NPS should take precedence over conflicting local or statutory bodies’ planning policies, while providing a “clear and unambiguous direction” to the secretary of state to prioritise the importance of climate change when making decisions.

The committee also called on ministers to make it easier for power lines to be buried underground in areas where there is a risk of disruption to overhead cables during periods of extreme weather, like the recent Storm Arwen.

The report stated that the recent revision to the NPS, which states that transmission cables should be buried rather than carried on pylons through national parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, will speed up the process for planning electricity connections through designated areas.

The committee recommends that ministers consider whether this support for undergrounding should be extended to include application in areas where problems with network resilience during storms are considered more likely in the future.

The NPS should be “closely” linked to targets for specific sectors in order to help incentivise the development of new and emerging technologies, which will be required to achieve net zero by 2050.

And the report called for the energy NPS, which is now being revised for the first time since it was originally published in 2011, to be reviewed at least every five years.

Darren Jones MP, chair of the BEIS Committee, said: “The government has a huge amount of work to do in partnership with industry to deliver the energy infrastructure required to hit net zero.

“The revision of the energy National Policy Statement is therefore welcome but more needs to be done on how this work links to reform of the planning system and the increased delivery of infrastructure across the UK.”