08:20 Wednesday 20th October 2010
Peterborough Breakfast Show BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.
PAUL STAINTON: Soon Flag Fen may have its very own wind turbines. A proposal has been made by TCI Renewables to install three of them that could power seven per cent of the homes in this city. A public exhibition is being held this week so people can learn more about the plans. Sophie Tucker is Project Development manager from TCI Renewables. Morning Sophie.
SOPHIE TUCKER: Good morning Paul.
PS: You’re sticking the turbines up. Tell us all about it.
ST: Well we’re proposing to erect three wind turbines. It’s about two miles east of Peterborough city centre. The location of the site is on agricultural land, which is owned by Anglian Water, and the real particular reason we’d like to put these turbines up is to provide electricty for the Anglian Water Flag Fen Sewage Treatment Works.
PS: Yes. But Flag Fen, you know, of huge historical importance, is it going to look right?
ST: Well we’re doing lots of studies at the moment. We’re working very very closely with Natural England. We’re working very closely indeed with the Flag Fen archeology park, and particularly that’s where the public exhibition is being held on Thursday. So we’re going through a lot of environmental assessments at the moment to understand how it’s going to look.
PS: And how big are they going to be?
ST: They could be up to a hundred and fifty metres. The four turbines quite locally there at McCains and Abbey Foods are a hundred and twenty five metres high. And the process that we’re undergoing at the moment is to understand technically and environmentally how high we would be happy going.
PS: They could provide some energy for Peterborough?
ST: They could indeed, yes. The primary reason that we’d like to put them there is for Anglian Water. They are a very high energy user. They consume about fourteen gigawatt hours of electricity per year. And these three turbines could provide that amount of electricity, possibly with any surplus being fed to the Grid. If we don’t feed that energy to the sewage treatment works we could provide power for around four thousand seven hundred homes. That’s equivalent to about seven per cent of the homes in Peterborough.
PS: You’ll be expecting a few objections though, won’t you? Quite a lot of these turbines have been objected to in the past.
ST: Well we hope that all the assessments that we’re going to be doing will help people understand the reasons for why they’re going up. Very much the reason for this public exhibition on Thursday is to answer questions from people, and understand their concerns. We’re very much at the beginning of the process at the moment, and we hope to submit a planning application next year. What we will do before we put that planning application in is to hold another public exhibition, when we’ve got a lot more answers in terms of the environmental assessment and technical studies thatwe’ve carried out.
PS: Sophie, thank you for that. We’ve got to leave it there. Thank you. Sophie Tucker, Project Manager from TCI Renewables. That exhibition by the way is to be held at Flag Fen Bronze Age Centre on Thursday 21st October from three thirty to seven thirty.
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