Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won the 2013 Forward Prize. His topical verse and satire appears in the Spectator, and his puzzles and problems in the Sunday Times and American Mathematical Monthly. Email: [email protected]
Turbine 42 Middle Moor SD 98389 34315 ///enormous.beaten.repair
This blog discusses the peat destruction that is required by any large version of CWF, and the guidance used by reputable developers. There is a parliamentary petition against building wind on protected peat and a link to it is given at the end of the blog.
30 January 2025 The wind is whipping across the plateau, and the temperature feels like minus 7 even though the sun is high in a blue sky. “What you’re trying to convey, Comrade …” says the dog, who has finished the audiobook of Animal Farm (5* Relatable) and is deep into 1984, “…is that it’s a bright cold day in January and the clocks are striking thirteen.”
I have lived here for five years but my mental model of the landscape is still West Highland. Down in the valley, I pretend Walshaw Moor is ridge and pass (aonach and bealach) when it is plateau and edge, like the Cairngorms, with red grouse instead of ptarmigan. Today’s walk is to a site on the plateau which is the key to the whole wind farm. By the end we will see why a reputable developer like SSE, who built 443 MW Viking in Shetland, would not build a wind farm on Walshaw Moor. It cannot meet their standards and remain profitable.
The blue drainage trees in the map above show wet contorted ground where a floating road is impossible. Neither turbines nor tracks go here. Some sites, T36 is a good example, winkle into the top of a drainage tree, but there will be expensive engineering consequences. The layout has been done with a map. What developers call “ground truthing”, which means having a look, would take out T36, which is much wetter than the map tells.
Numerically, almost all the traffic on a wind farm track is the vehicles used to build it, but their purpose is to carry a small number of very heavy and expensive deliveries, and then 30 years later the scavengers. When thinking of the track layout on the complex terrain of CWF, we must distinguish the spine, which might carry sixty-five such deliveries, and the spurs which will carry only one or two. The crane weighs 200 tonnes, and the blades are 60 metres long. A spur might drop at 12% because the risk assessment for that single delivery can be closely made, everyone concentrates on the day, and the insurers can be squared. The spine is in constant use and should be engineered to a lower maximum gradient of 9%, and should mostly follow the watersheds.
When walking through CWF on the Pennine Way, you are not experiencing the logistics of the wind farm at all; nothing is coming your way. I constantly meet people on the Pennine Way who don’t know this and say, “But you can’t get a turbine blade up here!” No wind farm of any size on Walshaw Moor can be understood without a visit to T42.
Where the peat is more than 100 cm deep it is uneconomic to scrape down to boulder clay, and fill with aggregate, so the track will float on a geogrid mesh along the red dashes. The point of a floating road is to maintain financial and engineering feasibility, not to conserve peat habitat.
It will be seen that the Brontë turbines T44 and T46 and their dependents T41, T62 and T36 are not on the CWF spine. The economic damage to Haworth, and the imaginative damage for anyone who comes halfway across the world in search of Wuthering Heights, can be somewhat reduced by taking out those five turbines and moving T45 east. As I’ve said before, Wuthering Heights is a key work in Japan, and its eroticism-in-wildness theme speaks to Japanese woman to such an extent that they come with perplexed and jealous husbands to pay homage to what the signposts call “Arashi ga oka”.
T36 is more caught up in the Black Clough drainage tree than any mapping shows; the peat is deeper than the survey found and will require a dismaying amount of destruction to reach after the Pennine Way is crossed. Getting to T50 will not be easy since the peat is deep on the traverse across steep ground. I haven’t been to T50 yet: it promises to be a tricky turbine site, with access from White Hill blocked by some of the steepest ground. Despite their proximity, T36 does not join up with T50.
The sequence T38, T57, T26, T3, T53 acts as a slalom to get down to the bridge crossing and access the western half of CWF. This descent is made on the shallowest peat which allows the long traverses and hairpins on steep ground. This would not be possible if the peat was deep, because floating roads would shear under sideways load. This intricate drop to the bridge is not ideal, and all the limestone, concrete and steel for half the wind farm must come down here, but a feasible CWF must be bigger than 150 MW so it must cross Walshaw Dean. A full study of the slalom will be published in T57 Lower Stones next time.
The dog and I probe the depth at the site of T42 and find 160 cm. There is a white stake to aim for and we use that to make our transect across the uniform heather. Our measured depths are shown below, and they confirm the survey, except the red 270 cm where the probe was almost buried.
The photograph below is taken at the junction of the T and shows the three-metre avalanche probe buried to the hilt. I could have pushed it in another 10 cm, but I was rightly worried about getting it back out again, and I had to grab the handle with both hands and do a series of weightlifter’s squat lifts to shift it. The red 250-300 cm peat depth here is not reported on the developer’s peat map. The peat survey should have continued outside the boundary so that we have an idea of what is being destroyed by the Brontë skyline track.
Putting a track across the Middle Moor ridge is a technically straightforward application of a floating road. The problem for Christopher Wilson is that such a route would not be suggested by any reputable developer because of the destruction to pristine peat. It is possible to build some kind of wind farm without destroying Middle Moor, but it is not possible to build a financially viable one given the distance to the substation. The spine track could instead run along the south boundary on the Bannister shooting track which mysteriously does not appear on the maps used to present the planning proposal, so cannot have played any part in the scoping application. Use of this track implies a 125 MW wind farm, because it means all pristine peat will be avoided, but Christopher Wilson has said CWF is not economic below 200 MW.
Above is the track layout design strategy used by the reputable developers of the 443 MW Viking wind farm in Shetland. We cannot call Executive Chairman Christopher ‘440 Kelvin-Volts’ Wilson a ‘reputable developer’ because he has no reputation in this field, and every word he says about his own project betrays him as a rookie. Despite the infamous peat slides associated with Viking, the Shetland terrain was far simpler than Walshaw Moor, because it allowed multiple access from quiet roads out of Sullom Voe terminal where the turbines landed.
We note first that Level 6 applies to the slalom down to the bridge: this is only acceptable because it is a) unavoidable to access half the wind farm, and b) sited on shallow peat. Level 8 and 9 applies to the swamps north of T37, but these can be skirted at Level 4, except for the crazy position of T60 on Cock Hill Swamp.
When we come to the T42 plateau described in this blog, the terrain is clearly at Level 9, STRONGLY AVOID and high in the class, because erosion gullies have not reached the mesotype. It cannot be “skirted” because the turbine sites are bang on the prime mesotype. It may be Level 10 as well: there are no red throated divers in lochans on the plateau, but there are breeding assemblages of red-listed curlews, golden plovers, and lapwings, as well as short-eared owls on this undisturbed plateau. What we now know to call “an intact mesotype centre” on CWF can only be “skirted” if the spine road turns left at T40 and hugs the southern boundary.
In a recent statement in the Lancashire Telegraph a CWF spokesman said:
“The project is currently going through an iterative design process which takes into account technical and environmental survey work. This process will inform the number, type, and location of wind turbines, together with other infrastructure. [… We are] continuing to assess how the project can be brought forward in a way that respects the local environment and the people who live, work, and visit the area.”
The idea of an “an iterative design process” comes from mathematics. An iterative solution to an equation starts somewhere near and tries to get closer. The geometric landscape can pull the iteration towards the solution or send it away, or cause it to orbit, or behave chaotically.
The classic iteration studies the intersection of a line and a range of parabolas. Variation in the landscape is made by stretching the parabola. Ecologists like this iteration because it models an increasing population x causing a decreasing food supply (1 – x). Sometimes the two factors achieve an equilibrium as in the first diagram below; sometimes there is an oscillation between two or more levels of population. We know about grouse cyclicity, “a good vole year”, and the chaotic lemmings whose annual population is like the far end of the Wikipedia animation of this iteration.
In the diagrams the red iteration is seeking the crossover, but if the landscape is hostile the outcome hops between non-solutions or becomes chaotic. The CWF “iterative process”, that Christopher Wilson says is happening now, is seeking the crossover between “enough turbines to make the development financially viable” and “a small enough destruction of an irreplaceable habitat to give Ed Miliband a fig leaf when he approves the application, despite a firm rejection by the Planning Inspectorate”. If the track turns right at T40, CWF ends up in gross destruction of irreplaceable habitat which no reputable developer would allow. Reputable developers have irreplaceable reputations which give them the opportunity to do business on good sites. Their reputation is far more valuable than one infamous wind farm on a bad site. Christopher Wilson is not a reputable wind farm developer. We know this because for a whole year he told the world that the National Grid ran at 440 Kelvin Volts and his wind farm was accepted to connect at Padiham when he’d signed up for Rochdale. Back to the decision at T40.
If CWF Ltd apply the standards of reputable developers, they will turn left at T40 and iterate their wind farm down to a 125 MW nubbin which will still be illegal under current international law. For this nubbin, 23% of the budget will have to be spent on a 132 kV trench to Rochdale that was Christopher Wilson’s idea, not mine, 2.5% had already been paid to Richard Bannister by 2023 and who knows how much more in 2024 and 2025 (we see the 2024 accounts by September 2025) and 7% will go on getting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of limestone as far as the elephant on the A6033 from quarries in North Yorkshire. Those heavy extra costs do not afflict normal wind sites.
Everything we know about Richard Bannister tells us that he’ll be paid for the whole site even though there’s only an iterated nubbin left for the Planning Inspectorate. The Planning Inspectorate then reject the application on multiple grounds, organised around the fact that this is too little power for too much destruction.
After that, it is down to Ed Miliband to wreck three cornerstones of UK planning law, his boss’s diplomatic relations with the EU and our worldwide obligations signed in December 2022 to the Kunming-Montreal Protocol. Christopher Wilson is hoping that Mr Miliband will do all that, entirely off his own bat, for an average power of 38 MW, some of which will still not reach homes because CWF will be turned off when it is windy in the North Sea, with constraint payments made to the owner.
The recent rhetoric about nature from Sir Keir Starmer shames his government, Labour Party members (I am one) and our country. Unable to get a grip on greedy and feckless humans alike, and searching for scapegoats, Sir Keir boasts that he is “Tough on curlews: tough on the causes of curlews.” Rather than demanding a hostile environment for golden plovers, the government should be working on our remarkable position in the table below. The UK is a hostile environment for heat pumps. They can only cling on in remote places because in the lowlands they are out-competed by mains gas.
Wind generation may be cheap compared to gas in 30 years, but “CWF will make cheap electricity for Calderdale” and “CWF will make clean electricity” are both untrue. CWF’s electricity may one day be “sometimes cheap” to people in detached houses in Rochdale and Preston (where it is being sent) who can afford to store surplus on windy nights in an EV on the drive and a battery bank and heat pump buffer in their plant rooms. They will be subsidised by people in back-to-backs. We will know the 2030 plan might be beginning to work for everyone if electricity ever gets near to twice the price of gas, at which point unsubsidised heat pumps will start to sell.
The Lancashire Telegraph headline says CWF is “a scam.” I would say that CWF would only make financial sense if it was in the Ozarks and Martin Freeman was using it to launder the profits of the Mexican cartel. There are some well-sited onshore wind farms; the best is 539 MW Whitelee by the M77 south of Glasgow, developed by reputable Scottish Power, and there are some terrible ones on the deep peat of the Flow Country that are an eternal stain on Scottish Nationalism.
Up on the plateau two golden plovers, over-winterers, warm as toast in the deep heather, start stereo peeping. We are glad to leave them to their safe arctic tundra and drop into the shelter of the Pennine Way. The dog says, “For Christopher Wilson, this has been Turbine 101.” I ask him for the Airedale view on the Ministry of Love. “Miniluv rats double plus good, Comrade.”
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Stronger Together parliamentary petition
We think the unintended consequence of building wind farms on protected peat land would be to worsen the nature and climate crisis – peatland’s stored carbon would be released as a result of infrastructure construction. Reliable analysis shows there’s plenty of available land in England for all the onshore wind farms needed for the green transition, without building on protected peatland. The Government should apply the precautionary principle – there is nothing to lose by doing so. Our petition to Parliament to ban wind farms from being built on protected peatland in England can be signed and shared at https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701290 This is a national petition – if you live near any windy, peaty, protected places, you too could be facing a proposal for a wind farm.
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Caroline Hudson is an abstract landscape artist based in Haworth, West Yorkshire. She works with paint and clay often incorporating found materials.
Place is integral to Caroline’s art: the essence of her paintings and ceramic work derives from her relationship with the environments she is drawn to, in particular the nearby moorland. Her work exudes an otherworldly exploration of surface, colour, and texture.
This is the 29th in a series of 65 guest blogs on each of the wind turbines which Richard Bannister plans to have erected on Walshaw Moor. Turbines 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 21, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 58, 62, 64 and 65 have already been described. To see all the blogs – click here.
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