A planning application for a wind farm on land to the south of Mansfield is shortly to be submitted to Newark and Sherwood District Council by npower renewables.

The application comes after a ten month period in which the company has carried out a wide range of assessments on the site's suitability, and consulted with local people. The application is for five wind turbines on the site known as Lindhurst, of height up to 125m to the tip. It is anticipated that these would produce enough renewable electricity for the average annual needs of around 4,700 to 5,100 homes. (This is derived from wind speeds measured at the site - see note 1).

To keep local residents fully informed about the application, npower renewables has produced a newsletter which is being delivered to local homes this week. In addition to providing more detail on the planning application, and the role the project could play in addressing the very serious issue of climate change, readers are also being offered the chance to visit an operational wind farm.

npower renewables' planning application is supported by a range of Environmental studies, covering all aspects of the proposal, from noise levels to wildlife. These reports run to several hundred pages and will be available for public scrutiny once the application has been made. Newark and Sherwood District Council will be consulting with the local community about the application and should be making copies of the information available for inspection during normal opening times at council offices and local libraries.

For those who would rather not study the reports in detail, a Non-technical Summary has also been produced. This is considerably slimmer, but still contains the key findings of the various environmental reports.

There will also be copies of this summary document at local venues, in addition to it being available as a pdf to download from the web-site www.npower-renewables.com/lindhurst (or residents can contact npower renewables for a free copy of the summary). Copies of the full reports are also available on CD or as a hard copy document, for a small charge - please contact Cath Stevenson at npower on 0118 959 2440 for further details.

In a letter to residents, being sent with the newsletter, npower renewables encourages residents to make their views on the proposal known to the planning authority.

For further information please contact Jeremy Hall at SHOUT! PR on 01623 651555

Lindhurst Wind Farm
npower renewables
Third Floor, Reading Bridge House
Reading
RG1 8LS

Notes

1. Based on an annual electricity consumption per home of 4700 kWh, which is derived from a total UK domestic electricity consumption of 117.589 terawatt-hours (TWh) and 25.2 million UK households giving 4,666 kWh per year per household. UK energy consumption is as stated for 2004 in The Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2005. The number of UK households is as stated for 2003 in the Mid-year Household Estimates for England (21.1 m), Northern Ireland (0.65 m), Scotland (2.2 m) and Wales (1.2 m) published in 2004 by the Office for National Statistics.
   
   The energy predicted to be generated by the proposal is derived from monitoring wind speeds in the area and correlating this data to wind speeds measured at Met. Office stations. This enables a calculation to be made to estimate the average annual energy production for the site based on 5 turbines each of rated capacity of between 1.65 and 2.5MW. The energy capture and equivalent homes figure relating to this project may change as more information is gathered.

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