Planning Bill

I am responsible for Amendment No. 24, which would raise the threshold for an onshore wind power station—or wind farm as they are widely although quite inexplicably known—from 50 to 300 megawatts. It is true that at present there are few onshore planning applications in the pipeline for onshore wind power stations of more than 50 megawatts. That would require, for example, 25 turbines of 2 megawatts each. However, the threshold is not out of reach for developers as turbines increase in power all the time and the incentive would be there for developers both to increase the size of turbines and increase the number of them per application. That provides an even more horrible prospect for the benighted denizens of and visitors to our beautiful upland landscapes. Ideally, I would have liked wind power stations to have been excluded from the Bill altogether, but as they are not mentioned by name it is not easy to see how that could have been done. The threshold of 50 megawatts applies to all onshore generating power stations. Of course, that is a ludicrously low figure in relation to gas, coal-fired or nuclear power stations, which typically range from 800 megawatts upwards to 2,000 or more megawatts per station. Nor was it necessary for that threshold to be set so low to catch the Severn barrage. It could have been set so low only in order to catch wind power stations—if not many of them today, perhaps more tomorrow and more still if the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, were adopted, which I think was his purpose. In doing this, the Government are abusing the purpose of the Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to deal with nationally significant infrastructure projects. Indeed, that is the title of this clause. How could they conceivably justify calling a 50 megawatt wind farm a nationally significant project? I should like the Ministers on the Front Bench opposite to answer that question directly this evening. A wind power station or wind farm of 50 megawatt installed capacity, which is what capacity means in the Bill because it can operate only part of the time owing to the variability of the wind, has on average in this country a load factor of 27 per cent. That means that a 50 megawatt power station as described in the Bill can develop only about 15 megawatts of power over the year. A thermal power station can operate at 80 per cent plus of capacity and so produce 50 to 100 times the amount of electricity of a 50 megawatt wind power station. How can they be talked about in the same breath? My amendment raises the threshold by a factor of six. This would take account of the load factor—it is misleading in the case of wind power and talking in terms of the installed factor because of the huge difference between them—and doubles that. This still does not take it anything like into the same league as a modern thermal power station, but would raise it substantially for all that.