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: nipmackinnon@gmail.com
Turbine 29 Oxenhope Stoop SD 99431 34361 ///plunge.overused.returns
6 March 2025 Spring has arrived on Walshaw Moor. Curlews and lapwings are already in force, walkers have their dogs on leads, and I have been on ten-hour days since the last blog, working on a Heritage Impact Assessment.
This blog is about the grid connection of CEP.
One of the things that bedevils the Net Zero policy is the truly vast weight of gold rush applications for battery, solar and wind farms on the Neso TEC register (transmission entry capacity). In 2025 there was an amnesty to try to get the most speculative proposals off the Neso TEC register, and a lot of noise was made about flushing out the queue. There are 30.5 GW of onshore wind in the queue, of which 13.1 GW is “shovel ready” fast-tracked to connect by 2030. Since the realistic size of Calderdale Energy Park is 130-240 MW, it represents 1%-2% of these shovel-ready proposals. However, CEP is not “shovel-ready”. Its present state is so up in the air that it appears twice in the Neso TEC register, as a 240 MW wind farm “accepted to connect” at an unbuilt substation at Leeds North NG (called ‘Narnia’ in these blogs) and a 170 MW wind farm “accepted to connect” at Rochdale DNO (the local distributor, not the National Grid.
In fact, CWF Ltd, the developers of CEP, are bending every nerve to get their wind farm “accepted to connect” at Bradford West NG substation. The difficulties of running the Neso queue can be seen in our famous small corner. Neso have tried amnesties, they have tried cajoling and they have used a plumber’s mate to flush out the worst of the queue squatters, but still CEP is “accepted to connect” at two substations neither of which they can afford because they are too far away. People are asking why the queue is being run in such an amateur way, but the grid engineers at Neso are the professionals. Facing them is a tidal wave of amateur wind, solar and battery projects all wanting to stake their claim in the gold rush. The professionals cannot seriously be expected to work for even ten minutes on the CEP connection at Rochdale because they are not going to Rochdale, and we showed why in this blog over a year ago. It is Bradford West or bust.
At the Hill Top Parishes meeting (in the previous blog on Mere Stones) CWF Ltd released a map, well they call it a map, of the cable corridor and the main access.
John Page and I had a lot to say about the peat slide risk on the access over Crow Hill and we note that the delicate traverse designed by Donald ‘Transparent’ Mackay over steep and 2.4 m deep peat has now been straightened to a brutal 13% straight up the grouse butts. The only consultees who observed the dangers of the route promoted at the Non-statutory Consultation were advised by us, so we got this right and we got it to the Planning Inspectorate, with the help of Haworth with Stanbury VC and Oxenhope PC (Planning Inspectorate Scoping Opinion p 102). Straight up Nan Hole Clough is in principle less dangerous than the previous Mackay plan but that will need more analysis. There is (at last) a lot of interest on the Lancashire side about this access. Again, as we showed here, it is not enough to straighten the Lancashire Moor Road sufficiently for the passage of the turbine blades using some temporary fixes. This road has to be widened to allow two-way working by a chain of stone delivery lorries bringing granite for the track surfaces, limestone for the concrete and heat transferring material to fill the cable trenches.
To analyse the cable route we first need to put it on a proper map.
The indefatigable John Page has walked the route already and below are some of his photographs with some more I took with my son Alasdair. We assumed at first that the cable would be buried for this 10.4 km. John thinks there is a more direct route for the second half through Denholme, but the dogleg around Denholme is essential to avoid the buried services supplying the houses.
The cable would first have to get from Sutcliffe Plantation substation, which we now rate at 66 kV/275 kV for reasons given here, which explain its vast size on the map.
The conducting section of the cable will be copper, not cheaper aluminium. The metal is insulated with XLPE (cross-linked polyethylene) and armoured with a HDPE outer sheath. At least three cable cores are needed, one for each phase. The cable can be a very heavy three-core cable or three lighter single-core cables laid side by side. Peat is a very poor disperser of heat, and a major factor, even the major technical factor, is that the cable trench has to be filled with CBS (cement bound sand) which pulls the heat away from the cables, or the duct must be drilled under the peat (horizontal direct drilling) and packed with a thermal grout.
Our photographs are now illuminating. The land is owned by Yorkshire Water, and we start where the cable must leave the tarmac and enters White Moor Lane. A three-core cable at 20 tonnes per 500 metre length can be delivered to the tarmac. Once we move onto White Moor Lane a 20-tonne delivery is no longer possible without a full access track, built to the same standard as the onsite network.
The economics are complex, but the optimum solution over this weak, very wet terrain may be to split the 3-core cable suitable for the tarmac deliveries into three one-core cables at 4-5 tonnes per drum and upgrade the track with geotextiles and a granite aggregate (Yorkshire Water would not use limestone here) enough to carry the lighter load. The three cables go flat in a 1.5 m-wide trench.
Every 500 metres there is a cable join to make, and this is hi-tech surgery, requiring a clean room and expert technicians. Each join is housed in an expensive concrete cable bay.
By now readers will be smelling a rat. This looks like an overhead pylon route. The cost and difficulty is piling up and although there is a short section of tarmac, we are soon back on a dirt track, though not as hopeless as White Moor Lane. Now the dogleg around Denholme goes through trackless fields before crossing the A629 north of the last houses in Denholme and entering narrow Whalley Lane which has room for one car with big dry-stone walls either side. You are suddenly aware of multiple overhead wires crossing the valley parallel to the road; two are big pylon lines and there are three-phase tridents carrying 132 kV. This is already a highly electrified landscape. It would be an outrage to put more pylons here and there is no choice but to bury the cable.
The Scoping Report is explicit that the cable will be buried all the way.
6.5.3 “Operational effects of the Cable Corridor Search Areas on ornithology can be scoped out of the assessment on the basis that the connection will be installed entirely underground. As the cable will be buried, there will be no physical infrastructure above ground during the operational phase that could lead to ongoing disturbance, habitat loss, or collision risk to bird species. Once reinstatement is complete, the land along the cable corridor will be returned to its previous use, allowing habitats to recover and function as before.”
You can search the Scoping Report for the word “underground” to find the other clear statements. The cable will be buried all the way.
This blog has always given some credence to a hobbity 130 MW wind farm because some people hope there could be a nice local wind farm up there. The connection costs of this wind farm run at about 30%-40% of the total budget. It would be connected to Bradford West at 132 kV on an “interim non-firm” contract. This would mean that the owners of the distribution network could turn off the connection when the transformers are running hot, and this curtailment would not be compensated. Eventually enough reinforcement work would allow CEP 130 MW to be firmly connected. In practice the uncompensated curtailment (and later the compensated kind) would happen on windy or sunny days, and the way to smooth the loss of income is with an on-site BESS, a battery that can soak up two hours of unexportable output.
CWF Ltd don’t want to build Hobbit CEP and it is not investable. The evidence is that the BESS has gone and the substation complex at Sutcliffe Plantation is so large. Further evidence was supplied to John Page by Cavendish representative Tom Andrews at the Oxenhope exhibition. When John asked, “So how many turbines really?” Tom answered, “High 20s”. CEP is 200-240 MW or go home.
I am certain the Wuthering Heights and King’s Gateway Clusters will be culled and that CWF Ltd expect them to be taking the proposal to 28 turbines. CWF Ltd think this might buy off the cultural heritage problem of building at the epicentre of Brontë Country. My main work now is to write a full cultural heritage impact assessment and it is a full-time job. Walshaw Moor is a very big, very famous site and the birds and habitats are intrinsic to the cultural heritage too, so the heritage impact assessment is complex.
The engineering costs are unusually high. The buried 275 kV cable across Walshaw Moor runs in very deep peat almost all the way. The cable will heat up, and this must be dispersed, but peat is one of the worst blankets. The cable trench must be filled with CBS (cement bound sand to pull heat from the cable. In the deepest peat they will use horizontal direct drilling to go under the peat.
A buried cable of this size and length has a huge capacitance. To protect equipment from sudden discharge a shunt reactor must be installed at the Sutcliffe Plantation end. The shunt soaks up the discharge at a price of £2 million. Shunts have recently been installed at Bradford West to stabilise the existing grid.
The costs of NG grid reinforcements at Bradford West and beyond are not socialised and are paid by CWF Ltd. They are difficult to model. CWF Ltd do not have “acceptance to connect” at Bradford West at either 275 kV or 132 kV. They may have to pay for a new bay, and unexpected upgrades, but these difficulties are faced by any proposal in a crowded bit of England. The unusual engineering drag on the proposal is the 8 km buried cable in very deep peat, the 10.4 km buried cable in very wet ground and the steep terrain civils.
If CWF Ltd exhibit a much higher level of competence than hitherto, they might get a DCO application for 200 MW submitted by Spring 2027, but there is so much to do and so little of it was in the useless Scoping Report, published as recently as September 2025.
I shall put your money where Christopher ‘440 Kelvin Volts’ Wilson’s mouth is. The strike price is what a consented wind farm bids in an auction for its electricity. If it bids too high, they don’t get a contract, but they must bid high enough to get their 8% annual rate of return. CEP is risky, mainly because of unforeseen connection costs and unusual civil engineering risks on the steeper sites.
The buried cable, especially in the peat, especially with the extra risk of the more drilling than they hoped, inevitably leads to a high strike price required for the proposal to get its money back. I reckon at 200 MW it would be £82/MWh in an auction that recently cleared at a maximum bid of £72.24/MWh (the prices are relative to 2024 and all I can do to explain the mechanism is give you a link to some industry propaganda; at least you know it’s biased.)
Alasdair, Teddy the Airedale and I had a walk up to T29 Oxenhope Stoop in between our efforts on the cable route, where your walk is never circular. T29 is on the buried cable route and is one of the most significantly visible turbines in CEP. It will be seen from Keighley, from Wuthering Heights, from the King’s Pennine Gateway and, remarkably, from Sylvia Plath’s grave in Heptonstall kirkyard. We came for the parish boundary stone, with its letter H facing the Haworth side of the Bradford/Calderdale watershed. Sometime soon I shall have time to explain a line of thought that started with this stone, first seen two years ago, and ten lines of Wuthering Heights understood only last week. Together they will constitute a reason for why CEP will not get its DCO at least as strong as a ransom demand for £81.99/MWh.
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This is the 54th in a series of guest blogs originally based on the 65 wind turbines which Richard Bannister planned to have erected on Walshaw Moor.
The developers canned their original 65 wind turbines, quite possibly in response to the public humiliation of having their so-called ‘plan’ publicly shown to be damaging, irrational and probably unlawful. They came back with a plan for 42 wind turbines and the amazing Nick MacKinnon and friends ridiculed that so-called plan. Now the developers have brought forward a 34-turbine revision for which this blog post is the first commentary. The series continues, probably from now on at 3-weekly intervals and aiming for Monday publications when possible.
To see all the blogs – click here.
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