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 42 Phantom SD 96629 33131 ///director.frantic.tripling
This blog was given for comment to the senior management of Logika and to Christian Egal, the Project Director of CEP on 30 September 2025.
The Scoping Report for Calderdale Energy Park landed in our inboxes on 3 September 2025. We had to write our responses by 29 September and then get them in front of the Planning Inspectorate. Walshaw Turbine Research Group (WTRG) have no direct access to the process. We depend on a network of people among the Statutory Consultees, including some of our readers here, to advance our observations about what is missing or wrong.
The Calderdale Energy Park (CEP) Scoping Report is a disaster for Project Director Christian Egal, for sole Director Dr Ghazi Osman, for the Executive Chairman Christopher Wilson and for the reputation of Logika. It is unprofessional and negligent. It will reduce public confidence in onshore wind, and it is an embarrassment for the Planning Inspectorate and the Secretary of State.
The CEP Scoping Report was assembled by Logika. This young company (founded 2020) replaced the established Natural Power (2002) who wrote the 2023 Scoping Report and whose logo was on the excellent maps for the Non-Statutory Consultation (29 April-10 June 2025). We shall miss Natural Power, who produced first class cartography with the information CWF Ltd gave them. CWF Ltd had no reputation in February 2022. Their behaviour since has led to a loss of repute, and the divorce between Natural Power, who make profits, pay tax and employ over a hundred people, including the excellent Emma on reception, and CWF Ltd who only make losses, have an opaque ownership entry at Companies House, can’t stop making blunders, and employ nobody at all, was probably inevitable. As bedfellows, Natural Power and Calderdale Wind Farm Ltd were like Henry VIII and Catherine Howard.
Scoping Reports are ‘boilerplate’, standard legal or technical paragraphs cut-and-pasted together. A Scoping Report should be fireproof. For a control, I have read the one for Vattenfall’s Glenmarkie that came out a week after CEP’s. Maybe the Planning Inspectorate are a softer touch than the Scottish Energy Consents Unit; maybe the standard is lower when presenting to the Secretary of State; but the Glenmarkie Scoping Report has no comical errors at all.
There are deep failures of understanding in the CEP Scoping Report, but this blog will deal with the comical errors that demonstrate incompetent management of the assembly by Logika and negligence in proofreading by CEP Project Director Christian Egal. I must stick to the comical errors for two reasons.
First, these errors are so obvious that the existence of deeper failures of understanding is inevitable. There can be no confidence in the integrity of a Scoping Report that has errors like these.
Second, it is a serious matter to describe the Scoping Report as ‘comical’ and Christian Egal as ‘negligent’. Logika and CWF Ltd have expensive lawyers, and I don’t want a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). I am on solid ground with their comical errors. I cannot afford to discuss the deeper failures because they might come after my pension. We must trust the Planning Inspectorate to read the Scoping Report responses and find the deep trouble for themselves. This comical material will guide them.
Part of Logika’s problem is that the CEP Scoping Report seems to have been sabotaged by a chatbot. The Planning Inspectorate issued guidance on A.I. use in documents on 6 September 2024. Logika, and their client CWF Ltd. will now have to show exactly where the comedy robot was used in the Scoping Report, though they should have told the Planning Inspectorate this already.
To help Logika find the issues, we shall call their chatbot ‘Marvin‘. To placate Logika’s lawyers, who can only be more formidable than Logika’s cartographers, we shall admit that what we call ‘Marvin’ might be a humanoid called Ford Prefect, a roads expert who doesn’t know that the M4 corridor runs from London to South Wales and that Lancashire is west of Yorkshire.
Along with Marvin and Ford Prefect, the third entity at Logika with ‘main character energy’ in the Scoping Report is ‘ST’ who made the worst maps.
Marvin has a brain the size of a planet and his mistakes will appear on the internet for other A.I.s to read, so that in the future the M65 will become the M56, and like the new pronunciation of ‘mischievous’ there will be nothing we can do about it.
“This is Boundary Mill. Open the doors, Marvin.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that Richard. The M65 doesn’t go to Colne.”
ST’s work is tragic. We don’t know their gender so I shall call them ‘Skylar T’. Their work is checked by ‘MT’, and I hope to God that MT isn’t Skylar’s mum. When I sent this blog to Logika for comment, I asked them to have a special care for ST. It is Logika management and CEP Project Director Christian Egal who are responsible for the wrong maps being sent to the Secretary of State.
I picture Skylar as an earnest young cartographer, a poster of Mercator on their bedroom wall, who once believed that map-making could build a fairer society, but who knows now that the Daleks are coming for their job in 2026 (“Co-or-din-ate! Co-or-din-ate!”) Perhaps Skylar has thrown their dividers into Logika’s machine in a last act of rage and defiance. It is indicative of Logika’s plans to employ Daleks as cartographers that their maps of CEP show neither stairs nor contours. Logika have made Walshaw Moor as flat as the planet Skaro.
Some say that the clue is in the name and ‘ST’ is Stronger Together’s mole in Logika. We never comment on security matters. I am not going to namecheck the many people that spotted all the work of Marvin, Ford Prefect and Skylar T in the Scoping Report, except for one, because it is a moment I shall never forget.
Lydia and I were sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen table on September 3, gloomily working our way through the impervious boilerplate. Some instinct told Lydia to start at the back on the unpromising section on Shadow Flicker. Here is the map, drawn by ST, checked by MT, dated 29 August 2025.
Lydia said, “The map 18-1 on Shadow Flicker has a Turbine 42 and no Turbine 38!”
We looked at each other in astonishment and joy. If Christian ‘The Eagle’ Egal had let the phantom T42 rise again, then there was no limit to how bad this Scoping Report could be. We returned to our work with enthusiasm. The phone started to ring …
Regular readers know all about Turbine 42 and will be asking themselves, “But how? How?? How in the name of all that is holy did Turbine 42 get itself submitted to the Secretary of State?”
There is an answer!
But first we must briefly recall the long history of T42.
Calderdale Energy Park was built on the ruins of Calderdale Wind Farm. On Launch Day 29 April 2025, the CEP website was published with seven maps, showing the layout of 41 turbines relative to the Peat Depths, the Access, the International Designations, the Hydrology and so on. Every map was wrong because each showed a T42 and no T38.
I rang Tom Andrews on the CEP Careline at 9.04 on 1 May 2025 and talked him through the problem. Becoming aware that a T42 in a 41-turbine layout was as unwelcome as ordering a Napoli at Pizza Express and finding Prince Andrew at the next table tucking into an American Hot, Tom said, “I need to refer this to Technical.”
At 10:30 this message popped up on the CEP website.
It is always inadvisable to say that your opponent is lying. “The location of T38 has not been changed” is a cover up, and the cover up is always worse than the crime. The reason an apparently minor relabelling needs a cover up goes back to February 2022. Christian Egal and CWF Ltd lawyers have never disputed the following account, sent to them in blogs and in legal letters to which they have replied.
T38 had originally been between T37 and T39 in a 42-turbine layout whose total power was 42 times 7.2 MW, putting the big “3” in “302 MW”. Late in the day at the CEP design meeting on 21 February 2025, somebody noticed that T38 was on the embarrassing blank area of the Peat Depth map, a probing failure that had been ignored since February 2022. T38 was deleted from the layout but without renaming T42, and the power drooped to a feeble 295 MW. Maps with T42 were drawn in good faith by Natural Power and loaded by CWF Ltd to the Documents section of their new CEP website.
A fortnight before the 29 April launch, the printers of the Consultation Brochure noticed the T42 mistake. New maps were made with T38 standing where T42 had been and the glossy brochure went to press with the correct maps. Phew!
With hallmark incompetence, nobody at CEP thought to load the correct maps onto the website, and on Launch Day all the maps were still wrong. When I rang Tom Andrews, I also told him the Peat Depth map had a scale gap. It was too late for the glossy brochure to be pulped, so the gap was corrected with a hand-inserted sticker.
I only have a screenshot of the Launch Day Peat Depth Map because I didn’t expect them all to be wiped by 10:30, and I’m sorry it’s a bit fuzzy. T42 is just east of the middle reservoir dam and T38 is missing on the white bit between T37 and T39 where the probing failed in February 2022. This 29 April version doesn’t have the scale-gap correction that went on the sticker. After 10:30 on 1 May 2025 this appears in the space below the key.
In the crisis meeting between 9.06 and 10:30, Project Director Christian ‘The Eagle’ Egal and Executive Chairman Christopher ‘440 Kelvin Volts’ Wilson must have felt the matter needed some spin, which is why they authorised the implausible statement: “The position of T38 has not been changed.” Nothing to see here!
Readers who feel it is time to forgive and forget Christopher Wilson’s claim on his previous website that the National Grid runs at “440 Kelvin Volts” may reconsider when we come to the staggering ‘rhododendron and Himalayan balsam’ section of the Scoping Report. There is no escape for Christopher Wilson from his company’s incompetence. He has been on a dark moorland highway, cool wind in his hair and is living it up at the Hotel Calderdale.
At the Trawden public consultation, I asked Donald Mackay, the lead CWF Ltd consultant, about T38 and he said, “T38 was on the blank bit of the peat survey, so we moved it.”
Consultants are self-employed mercenaries. Their primary loyalty is to their own companies, not the project. They will not lie or become accessories to an implausible cover up, because they trade on their crystal-clear reputations, and Donald ‘Transparent’ Mackay has the lowest refractive index in the industry. At CEP awaydays his karaoke number is, ‘Now, I’m the king of the turbines, O, the wind farm VIP’. The other consultants are in awe of him. I’m certain he did not see this unprofessional Scoping Report before Christian Egal sent it to the Secretary of State. Donald Mackay will survive the wreck of the CEP Scoping Report, like Ishmael in Moby Dick.
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
How did ST of Logika draw a map with the phantom T42 and publish it in the final chapter of the CEP Scoping Report, and why did Christian Egal send it to the Secretary of State?
Chapter 13 on Noise and Vibration gives us the clue. The Logika acoustics expert (we’ll meet him later: he’s a scream) has modelled the CEP layout noise. I’m sorry if he’s a she. There’s a pomposity that seems stereotypically male, but when it comes to laying it on thick, we must always reckon with the Queen of Sheba.
The software credited for drawing the decibel contours on map 13-1 is windPRO. I have registered with windPRO and taken some of their tutorials, so I know this: if you want to make maps of Noise or Shadow Flicker or Cumulative Turbines, you click on the Layout Library drop-down, and all your layouts are there. Unfortunately, CWF Ltd have three layouts in the library, all with file names beginning Calderdale … and we know what can happen with long file names.
One of the Calderdale layouts is CEP, with 41 turbines labelled from T1 to T41; one is the 65-turbine layout of CWF, described to me by Donald ‘Transparent’ Mackay as “worse than useless”; and one has no T38 and a phantom T42 instead. Christian Egal, rapidly becoming the Inspector Clouseau of renewables, needs to put a stake through T42.
Skylar T only made three layout maps in the Scoping Report and was allowed to use all three layouts. Skylar’s checker MT (let it not be mum!), and the senior management at Logika who signed off the Scoping Report, did not notice, and Christian Egal waved them through to the Secretary of State.
It is appropriate that the phantom turbine T42 has come back to haunt Christian Egal in the section on Shadow Flicker.
In 2023, CWF Ltd spent more than £750,000 on survey fees and consultancy. The same items in 2024 are about £1.3 million. I reckon the 2023 Scoping Report for Calderdale Council by Natural Power must have cost £500,000 for its 140 pages.
The 2023 report was only going to Calderdale Council, but the 2025 one is for the Planning Inspectorate and the Secretary of State, so it had to be the cat’s pyjamas. Logika may have had CWF Ltd over a barrel given the short deadline following the unexplained departure of Natural Power, and CWF Ltd have no top-of-the-food-chain developer (Vattenfall, SSE, EDF) in the background who would bring Logika the possibility of more work. I reckon the 2025 Scoping Report cost CWF Ltd more than a million pounds, and though you might not expect the Logika Platinum Service for a mere seven figures, you expect all the maps to be right, even if you are a bambiraptor in a world of tyrannosaurs.
Instead, for six briefcases full of the investor’s fivers, Christian Egal and Christopher Wilson got the one map they never wanted to see again, whose existence they had covered up on a popup – “The position of T38 has not been changed” and Logika printed this map right at the end so it was the last thing the Secretary of State saw before he turned out the light after 577 pages.
Tempting fate, by 30 August 2025 somebody at CWF Ltd had taken down that nasty popup about T38 and T42. Nothing to see here!
Light relief: the road numbering debacle
I am moved by Skylar T, a cartographer working at the end of days, waiting for the Daleks to steal the job they love. The astonishing mess that Logika made of the road numbers is in a lighter vein, even if it is devastating to the status of the Scoping Report, to Logika who wrote it and to Christian Egal who accepted it and sent it to the Secretary of State. When you are done with the nil-nil defensive competence of Vattenfall’s Glenmarkie Scoping Report, turn to Logika’s Chapter 12. As the Stoke City manager Alan Durban famously said, “If you want entertainment, go and watch clowns”.
Most of the CEP Scoping Report is cut-and-paste, but some seems to have been written specially by the chatbot Marvin. No human who was remotely qualified to write Chapter 12 on Access, Traffic and Transport could make all these mistakes unaided. To protect myself from Logika’s libel lawyers, when I say, “This bit looks like Marvin”, I always mean that it could also have been done by a someone called Ford Prefect who doesn’t know that the M4 goes to Cardiff because he comes from Betelgeuse and not from Guildford after all.
12.4.2
Bullet point 2. “A6068 between the M56 and Colne”.
The A6068 does not join the M56. For “M56” read M65.
Bullet point 6. “A6063 between Hebden Bridge and Cross Roads.”
For “A6063” read A6033. The A6063 is a link road in Preston.
Bullet point 7. “A464 between Todmorden and Mytholmroyd.”
For “A464” read A646. Any human qualified to write or check a chapter on Access and Transport would know that the “A464” must be in the M4 corridor from London to South Wales. This is prima facie Marvin.
12.4.5
Bullet point 2. “A6068 between the M56 and Cowling; Count sites 28783 (Colne)”
For “M56” read Colne. Here “M56” cannot be read as “M65” because the M65 traffic count is in the previous bullet point. Double points to Marvin.
12.4.8
“Onsite PRoW present on the A6063”.
For “A6063” read A6033 or A6068, or both. A PRoW is a public right of way, and since neither A6063, A6033 nor A6068 is an onsite road, a PRoW “present” on these roads cannot be onsite. The A6063 is a PRoW, so it could be “present” on itself, but it still would still not be “onsite”, even if wasn’t in Preston. This mess is either Marvin or Ford Prefect. Only Logika can tell the Secretary of State.
12.4.11
“The A6068 is operated by Lancashire County Council and is mainly a two lane distributor road. It connects the M56 to West Yorkshire and passes through the town of Colne.”
For “M56” read M65. For “West Yorkshire” read North Yorkshire. On the face of it, pure Marvin, who is flaunting his knowledge of the historic Yorkshire ridings, lost in 1974. The trouble with a brain the size of a planet is that you can know too much.
12.4.16
“The A464 provides an east-west connection between Lancashire and West Yorkshire, connecting Burnley to Halifax.”
For “A464” read A646. For “east-west” read west-east. Marvin seems to have been confused by the “West” in “West Yorkshire”.
12.6.6
Bullet point 6: “Users of the A6063 between Hebden Bridge and Cross Roads.”
For “A6063” read A6033. The A6063 runs past the tram depot in Preston.
Bullet point 9: “Residents living alongside the A6068 between the M56 and Cowling”.
For “M56” read M65.
Bullet point 10: “Residents living alongside the A644 between Todmorden and Mytholmroyd.”
For “A644” read A646. This is Marvin’s third version of A646. Or was it Ford Prefect? I must be careful because suggesting that Logika used Marvin to write a Scoping Report for a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project might be a libel if it turned out to be Ford Prefect all along, because they must not use Marvin without telling the Inspectorate on submission.
12.7.1
Bullet point 6: For “A6063”, read A6033.
Bullet point 7: For “A6063”, read A6033.
Bullet point 8: For “A6063”, read A6033.
A final flourish from Marvin, no?
There is much more road error to come, which human readers will identify easily enough once they have corrected at least fifteen road numbers. Thousands of tons of ‘bulk materials’ evaporate between the A629 and the A6033 for example, but Ford Prefect can be forgiven for losing all that aggregate in the misnumbered maze.
The deep problems in Chapter 12 are to do with the peat slide risk on Crow Hill. We shall start on that at the end of this blog and set to work properly in a fortnight.
Ch 7: Plagiarised research
Scoping Report 7.4.20 However, non-native and invasive species were recorded, including Himalayan balsam at six survey locations (five on the River Kelvin and one on the Water of Feugh). Rhododendron was also recorded at two locations along the Black Dean. Artificial reinforcement of the watercourses was recorded at 20 locations and included use of brick/stone, gabions and culverting.
The River Kelvin runs through Glasgow, past the university where Baron Kelvin was Professor of Natural Philosophy for 53 years. The Water of Feugh is the largest tributary of the Dee in Aberdeenshire.
Black Dean has not been found. The late Dean Black was a grime rapper whose record label was Dank of England. You never know with Marvin. He’s been trained on the whole internet. Rivers, rappers, he knows everything. All the right notes but not necessarily in the right order.
There are no gabions on the watercourses of Walshaw Moor and brick is never used in culverting because the moor is entirely made of a famous building stone which they use instead. Strong in a block: weak as aggregate.
Marvin has stolen this research from the University of Stirling, and the scientists there have been informed so they can take appropriate action to protect their reputations. This nonsense is either human scientific fraud or Marvin: Logika must choose their poison. I pick Marvin and await my letter from the Logika lawyers if they want to claim that a human wrote that stuff about the River Kelvin. Marvin thought the Scoping Report was a bit thin on invasive vegetation and he knows more about rhododendrons than Charlie Dimmock has forgotten. There is more of this lurking in the Scoping Report, but with just 29 days allocated by the Planning Inspectorate, and facing a possible SLAPP, we can only be expected to discuss the most striking examples of Marvin’s incendiary helpfulness.
In Dune, humanity destroyed all the thinking machines in the “Butlerian jihad”, but Douglas Adams got the real future right in Hitchhiker’s: our plastic pals will drive us to distraction with their cheerful incompetence. “Glad to be of service!”
The EIA that is built on this Scoping Report will have a thousand statements that are vulnerable to Marvin making things up to keep the client happy, so this is a very serious problem that must be nipped in the bud by the Planning Inspectorate. They have full powers to require CWF Ltd. and Logika to identify all of Marvin’s work in the Scoping Report.
And out of the blue, Kelvin returns to mock Christopher Wilson! At the incompetent Hotel Calderdale, they are programmed to receive: Christopher ‘440 Kelvin Volts’ Wilson can check out any time he likes, but he can never leave.
I don’t know why a reputable developer would choose Logika to write their Scoping Report after this performance. Perhaps the rest of the Scoping Report is so outstanding that wrong maps, scientific fraud, a bumptious robot, and road numbering bingo are forgotten amid the Bafta-nominated prose and razor-sharp cut-and-paste. Perhaps Logika will become consultants of last resort for one-off customers like Christopher ‘440 Kelvin Volts’ Wilson.
There is a taverna in Corfu whose owner has a menu for people he thinks are never coming back, “I make you the special lobster linguine.” It arrives with chewy limpets in recycled lobster shells, and then you get the bill for €1000. A clip-joint, but still cheaper than the Logika Scoping Report.
Light relief: Marvin can spell
The spelling in the Scoping Report is excellent. There are about 150,000 words and 149,965 of them are correct, an accuracy rate of 99.98%.
As Christian Egal says in the Consultation Brochure: “Given the Site’s heritage value, we are committed to respecting the local historical and cultural features throughout the planning and development process.” It is a noble intention and nobly expressed. It is unfortunate that literally the only word Marvin cannot spell is “Brontë”, which he gets wrong thirty-five times.
Ch 13: Return of the “worse than useless” layout
Maps 13-1 and 13-2 are adjacent in the Scoping Report, were both drawn by ‘ST’ and checked by ‘MT’ and both revised on 29 August 2025. The first shows the layout of 7.2 MW turbines published in the Non-statutory Consultation. It is intended to show noise contours.
Map 13-2 shows the cumulative noise effect of the various wind farms built nearby. From the drop-down menu of layouts, this time Skylar T chooses the 65-turbine Calderdale Wind Farm described by Donald Mackay as “worse than useless”.
Why was Skylar, plainly an absolute beginner with the software, allowed to make the maps in the Scoping Report without the work being checked by senior management at Logika? Why did Project Director Christian Egal not check all the maps before he sent three different versions of his own layout to the Secretary of State?
The author of Chapter 13 Noise and Vibration has grown sleek and pompous in the consultancy game; “17 Years Principal Consultant and full member of the Institute of Acoustics and has over 17 years of experience in undertaking noise assessments for wind farm developments.” Principal Consultants at Logika are much too grand to check the adjacent maps on which their analysis is based. The moment this Principal Consultant is not cut-and-pasting other people’s research he comes unstuck.
Consider the section on Amplitude Modulation in the Scoping Report, helpfully defined by our Principal Consultant.
13.5.12 “In its simplest form, Amplitude Modulation (AM), by definition, is the regular variation in noise level of a given noise source. This variation (the modulation) occurs at a specific frequency, which, in the case of wind turbines, is defined by the rotational speed of the blades, i.e. it occurs at the rate at which the blades pass a fixed point (e.g. the tower), known as Blade Passing Frequency.”
What he wants is for AM to be scoped out of the Environmental Impact Assessment. He has the same boilerplate studies that you will find in Vattenfall’s Glenmarkie, and they are duly cut-and-pasted into position. He concludes:
13.5.21 “At time of writing there is no agreed methodology which can be used to predict the occurrence of AM or an agreed methodology which can be used to determine whether the effects of AM, should it occur, are likely to be significant. Agreement is sought that amplitude modulation should be scoped out of EIA.”
Nobody raised AM in the response to the 2023 Scoping Report. Our Principal Consultant is starting a fight with himself on the dreaded AM, perhaps to bolster his importance with cheap boilerplate. What he hasn’t noticed is the stonking great amplitude modulator sitting in the middle of the wind farm whose noise levels he has just modelled in Figure 13-1.
13.3.5 […] “Preliminary desktop noise modelling was undertaken using EMD windPRO software290. An initial indicative wind turbine layout based on the layout presented at the non-statutory consultation was input into the software and, using noise data for a candidate turbine representative of the type that could be installed on the site (note 291), a noise contour plot was produced (shown on Figure 13-1)”.
Note 291 tells us that the candidate turbine used for predictions is the Vestas V162 7.2MW with a 119 m hub and 200 m tip, the very model I picked from hundreds a couple of months ago when we first analysed the aerodynamics. The two assumptions used by the Principal Consultant to create his noise model give a grossly overcrowded wind farm.
In the UK, the minimum spacing in a wind farm is 3 rotor diameters across the prevailing wind, and 5 rotor diameters downwind. This prevents turbulence thrown off by the blade tips from damaging a neighbour and allows the turbulent slow-moving wake behind the turbine to fill somewhat before the next turbine. UK onshore wind farms are crowded by international norms, where a 6-10 RD spacing is usual downwind. Real UK wind farms are properly spaced. Here for example are the three shown in the Principal Consultant’s Map 13-2 map.
When the Principal Consultant’s chosen layout is analysed on the same footprints, the result has huge overlaps.
No real wind farm in the UK looks like this, though more will if the Planning Inspectorate take their eye off the ball, because developers and manufacturers have an incentive to overcrowd at our expense. The good news is that Sir Keir Starmer has made a statement on wind farm developer shenanigans. Overcrowding can inflate curtailment payments, about which Prime Minister Starmer has said “It’s a problem that wasn’t fixed over the last 14 years, but a problem that we are determined to fix as we go forward.” As it happens, CWF Ltd. proposed a correctly-spaced wind farm under the Conservatives and a grossly overcrowded one under Labour.
Of course, if the Planning Inspectorate are up to speed, the CEP layout finally proposed cannot be as overcrowded as the one modelled for noise, but we are here to appraise this Principal Consultant in his own terms.
His noise model in 13-1 uses a distance weighted average of the published noise intensity of the Vestas 162 7.2 MW turbines to calculate the noise at each point. Points of equal noise are joined with coloured contours like ’50 dB’.
AM noise is not this average noise. It occurs at particular frequencies, and right in the middle of his model is a vast Amplitude Modulator, the grossly overcrowded turbines of the T21-T24 cluster. This Amplitude Modulator is next to the Pennine Way, and we are told in 12.4.19 that “PRoW users within the site will be considered as highly sensitive receptors.”
These four turbines will have similar blade passing frequencies and because they are so close together the noise will not decay much between them. If you make two notes of similar frequency and amplitude and play them together you get the inevitable amplitude modulation called acoustic beats, which piano tuners use to determine if two strings have identical pitch. It sounds like this, and looks like the graph below on an oscilloscope, a 16 Hz sine wave (four octaves below middle C) added to an 18 Hz one.
The resulting sound wave exhibits the amplitude modulation called acoustic beats. The envelope of the wave form can be calculated using a standard identity:
sin 2x + sin 2y ≡ 2 sin (x + y) cos (x – y).
The two waves with frequency 18 Hz and 16 Hz combine to give a wave form whose pitch will be 17 Hz but whose amplitude envelope ±2cos(x –y) will have two pulses of noise every second. The piano tuner knows the strings have the same pitch when no AM occurs when they are played together.
If the turbines are further apart, then the amplitudes of interfering waves will be reduced. In the diagram below we show sum of 16 Hz and 18 Hz waves but with different amplitudes. There will still be AM, but less extreme.
The real wind farms adduced as evidence in the Scoping Report are properly spaced and so don’t generate much AM. The wind farm modelled by the Principal Consultant is grossly overcrowded, so it will inevitably produce AM noise, especially from the T21-T24 cluster past which the “highly sensitive receptors” (12.4.19) on the Pennine Way will be walking. “Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap!” The cure for AM noise is proper spacing.
The abuse of science in this argument on AM that nobody asked for is scandalous. The Principal Consultant raises AM noise. He uses assumptions to model average noise that involve a grossly overcrowded wind farm. His windPRO model cannot find AM noise in the layout because it averages out over the whole spectrum. He adduces many studies on AM noise that are based on existing wind farms which are properly spaced and uses them as evidence to scope out AM noise from his own grossly overcrowded CEP, where AM is inevitable.
He says “At time of writing there is no agreed methodology which can be used to predict the occurrence of AM” when the very model he has created would produce predictable AM noise from four 200-metre-high turbines built much too close together.
Our society depends on mathematical modelling, but the British people are becoming hostile to it. The scandalous conduct of Chapter 13 is not excused by the disclaimer at the end of it.
Logika began as a noise consultancy. The Principal Consultant is likely to be senior. If that is so, he is one of the people who should have checked the Scoping Report before it was given to Christian Egal at CWF Ltd, but he didn’t even check his own maps.
Ch 8: All the hydrology maps omit the Greave Clough sluice and tunnel
The whole of CEP is liable to cause a major flood in the Calder valley, because it is grossly overcrowded and many turbines are now perching on the steep edges in a vain attempt to get them off the deepest peat and away from each other. The tracks to the perched turbines will accelerate storm runoff towards Hebden Bridge.
The only area the Scoping Report explicitly names for flood risk is in 4.3.11: “A large area at risk of surface water flooding, on the western side of the Turbine Area, is the Waterfall Syke and Cross Dike.” This sentence was probably written by Marvin because the two linear features Cross Dike and Waterfall Syke do not make an ‘area’. What Marvin means is “the large area around Waterfall Skye and Cross Dike.”
This is the area west of Greave Clough where T38 was going to be until they moved it, and the place where WTRG have been concentrating their fieldwork. There is also a large area here where CWF Ltd don’t know what the peat is like because they didn’t complete the survey in February 2022 and never went back. The previous Scoping Report in 2023 showed the truth about the peat survey in the honest map by Natural Power.
The crosses are where CWF Ltd claim to have had the peat probed. The map is coloured between the crosses by an algorithm. The probing was not finished, and the algorithm guesses the colour with decreasing accuracy until it admits defeat and leaves white. Inside the thin red boundary without crosses, CWF Ltd have no idea about the peat depths and have not known since February 2022. The latest version of this Peat Depth Map, published on the CEP website, does not have the honest Natural Power crosses that reveal the extent of a failure to probe the peat that now extends for almost four years.
This is a useless map for thinking about flooding because it hasn’t got the National Grid on it, and has no contours, but much worse, it hasn’t got the Greave Clough sluice and tunnel either. Skylar T is not to blame for any of that.
This is the sluice on a quiet day, with the tunnel on the right. But …
… in times of storm, the gently sloping tunnel is overwhelmed, the sluice fills and the torrent goes over the dam, down a spillway built for the purpose and straight to Hebden Bridge and the Calder valley.
Storm flow in Greave Clough is not the same as normal flow, but you would never know that from the Scoping Report Hydrology maps 8-1, 8-2, 8-3. The absent sluice and tunnel are north of the bump on the site boundary, just above the “h” in “Greave Clough”.
On a normal day the water is in the tunnel to Widdop Reservoir. The tunnel surfaces briefly at Pig Hole Dike and then goes deep under the charismatic Scout Ridge (here called Slack Stones) to a short surface conduit that enters Widdop Reservoir just above the dam.
Much of CWF Ltd.’s incompetence, which has been spiralling since February 2022, comes together in the map above. We must use the discontinued hydrology map made by Natural Power because the Logika one is so useless. CWF Ltd. don’t know there is a sluice and a tunnel in Greave Clough; they failed to finish the peat survey between February 2022 and August 2025; they cancelled T38 but left T42 in (21 February 2025); they published seven wrong maps with a T42 on each (29 April 2025); they published seven maps with T38 where T42 had been (10:30, 1 May 2025); they published a cover up during the Non-statutory Consultation (1 May-10 June 2025) claiming that T38 had always been where T42 was; they took down the popup admission of error and the cover-up (late August 2025) because they didn’t want the Secretary of State to see it; and that was just in time for the printing of the wrong T42 map again in 18-1 of the Scoping Report (1 September 2025) because ST at Logika was an amateur at using windPRO and nobody checked.
All this is in the very area of Cross Dike and Waterfall Clough where the flood risk to the Calder valley has been identified and named by CWF Ltd.; all this is on an 11% slope (flat as a pancake in 8-1) where CWF Ltd intend deep cut tracks through the heavy peat down to boulder clay, which will have to be trenched, filled with quarry waste, topped with imported granite, and double ditched. These tracks will allow CWF Ltd. to tow the 80-metre turbine blades up to T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, T6, T7 and T37; and these double-ditched French drains will dry out the peat on Field of the Mosses for hundreds of metres in all directions, accelerating erosion in an area where taxpayers have been working to slow the flow and restore the peat by blocking the drains. In a storm these new drains and tracks will accelerate the acknowledged surface flooding around Cross Dike and Waterfall Syke that is gathered in the Greave Clough funnel and send it to the sluice, which the torrent will jump, and surge on to Hebden Bridge, direct.
These are the errors that are easy to spot and explain. The deeper errors are harder to see and take longer to explain, but Stronger Together calmly do so in their response to the CEP Scoping Report.
Crow Hill
Next time we will look at what the Scoping Report has to say about the delivery of all the turbine components across Crow Hill. Marvin’s account of the notorious soil mechanics on Crow Hill is not extensive. It consists only of the second sentence of 8.3.29.
8.3.29 “A large proportion of the Cable Corridor Search Areas and eastern Site Access Search Areas have no superficial deposits and where present, lie within peat deposits. The western Site Access Search Area is underlain by superficial deposits of Glacial Till where present.”
That this is robotic slop will be clear to readers, and to the Logika libel lawyers. Rather than giving the messenger a SLAPP they would be better engaged helping their client find all the other stuff Marvin wrote in the Scoping Report and confessing it to the Planning Inspectorate.
The only other mention of Crow Hill is in 8.3.26, which is not written by Marvin because it has “Brontë” right.
8.3.26 “To the north and outside of the Turbine Area, there are two recorded peat landslides, one of which is known as the Crow Hill bog burst (Ross, 2020), described by the Rev. Patrick Brontë. LiDAR data indicates no equivalent features within the proposed turbine area.”
The reference (Ross, 2020) which Logika hope will explain the peat slide risk on their turbine access route is Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene a daunting and brilliant post-doctoral examination of patriarchal exploitation in Shirley and Villette by Shawna Ross, which I have read and enjoyed. Telling soil engineers to read Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene is like recommending Lady Chatterley’s Lover to your gamekeeper.
Nobody human at Logika has read Ross 2020, which says on page 61, “Wind farm erection causes peat bursts and slides by developing new shear planes”. The quirky intellect of Christian Egal means that he alone at CWF Ltd might have read Ross 2020; it is in the tradition of the French semiologist Roland Barthes. The problem for his employer is that Christian Egal hasn’t read the Scoping Report. In fact, the only entities who have read every word of Ross, 2020 and the CEP Scoping Report are me and Marvin.
If Mark Avery and I haven’t had a SLAPP from Logika’s lawyers, we shall meet again in a fortnight to get on with Crow Hill!
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This is the 45th in a series of guest blogs originally based on the 65 wind turbines which Richard Bannister planned to have erected on Walshaw Moor. Turbines 5, 6, 6CEP, 8, 8CEP, 9, 11, 13, 14CEP, 14, 16, 17, 18CEP, 20CEP, 21, 21CEP, 25, 25CEP, 27, 29CEP, 31, 32, 33, 33CEP, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 42CEP, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64 and 65 have already been described.
The developers have 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 have come back with a plan for 42 wind turbines and the amazing Nick MacKinnon and friends have regrouped and set off on a new tack too. The series continues.
To see all the blogs – click here.
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