Small wind turbines

New guidelines

In May 2014 the MOD and Scottish Government published interim guidelines for the installation of wind turbines in the vicinity of the Eskdalemuir Seismic Array. The new guidelines can be found on the Scottish Government website.

Our previous work was concerned with vibrations from large wind turbines, the vibration levels from small and micro turbines were not known when the EKA safeguards were originally developed. However, in June 2008, the MoD agreed an interim position, pending further research. The interim position is that if a proposed small turbine (defined as having rated-power ≤ 50 kW) within the statutory consultation zone is calculated to contribute ≤ 0.00001 nm to the budget, then this is considered negligible, and does not contribute to the noise budget managed by DE.

MoD/DE recently became aware of substantive research into vibration from small and micro wind turbines (including monitoring and modelling) by Professor Styles and his group, the Applied and Environmental Geophysics Research Group (AEG), at the University of Keele.

In the light of this, and possible future research by AEG, the MoD has decided on the following pragmatic approach to extend the interim position on what can be considered a negligible contribution to the Eskdalemuir seismometer array “noise budget” when considering consent to build and operate small turbines in the statutory consultation zone around EKA.

The intention of the extension to the current interim position is to allow effective exploitation of the research by AEG to allow an ad hoc assessment by AEG and MoD experts of whether specific design-types of small turbine can be permitted in the consultation zone. This extended approach is itself an interim measure pending development of a generic approach to safeguard EKA.