Faw Side Community Wind Farm

An Exercise In Futility

While working on a big update for Nimby Radar (nimby.bemben.co.uk) - I found a small little tidbit, a large wind farm, with enough capacity to supply energy to an insane amount of houses, that was very recently rejected.

Faw Side Community Wind Farm.

I initially thought it was a bug within my calculation, the REPD database is incredibly annoying to parse, and i’ve made a whole string of mistakes in the past.

Faw Side Community Wind Farm has somehow taken 4 years to be rejected.

I verified the information.

It was correct.

A total of 1675 days. It took longer for this wind farm to get rejected than for me to finish an entire university degree. A project that has lasted from 2019 to 2023, before planning permission was refused.

Curious, I decided to find out a little bit more. Luckily, the beauty of Scottish Energy planning is that absolutely every single document is open and available online.

In this case, all 496 of them.

This is more than just another cancelled renewable project in the plethora of cancelled projects. This itself is nothing short of an art piece. A kafka adventure into the world of planning.

Skimming through, one finds a hopeful naivety - the first, dated 21st May 2019, shows a 4.5mb Site location document. You can feel the joy radiating off of this page. A proposed turbine layout. A proposed turbine layout that would never be.

On the 22nd of May, we again, publish a list of Goose sightings. The incidental sighting of a large number of Pink footed goose, and one barnacle goose provide an eye into the impending doom.

But for now, all appears safe. We even see an initial string of support for the development coming in within the first set of public documents.

The peace is broken, on August 2019th, when the flood 100 objections roll in. The first signs of doom, on the horizon.

The Muckle Toon Adventure Festival would soon spell the end for Faw Side Wind Farm.

End of Part 1