News Archive Page
Dated 24/11/04

Highways Agency Rule Against Wind Farm - The Highways Agency has put in its response to the Cambridge Wind Farm planning application after researching the accident history for highways near to existing wind farm sites. Whilst they were unable to find conclusive evidence that existing wind farms distract drivers leading to an increase in accidents they found that 60% of the accidents on the A14 were "tail end shunts" or accidents caused by evasive action to avoid such shunts.

In the light of this they said that they would have concerns with any proposed development that might cause drivers to temporarily avert their attention from the road ahead. They therefore provided South Cambridgeshire Council with the following advice:

"Work should not start on the Cambridge Wind Farm until such time as the A14 between Huntingdon and Cambridge has been improved as part of the wider A14 Ellington to Fen Ditton improvement scheme."

The reason for their advice was that the above improvement scheme would produce stable traffic flow conditions on the A14 and they felt that any temporary distraction would pose less of a risk to highway safety compared to the current unstable situation.

 

In addition they also objected to three of the turbines which are in conflict with their emerging proposals for the improvement scheme.

This is great news for the campaign given that any improvement work would not commence before 2006 at the earliest and probably many years later. This makes it difficult to see how this planning application could even be considered at the moment. Indeed with Cambridge Airport still objecting that the wind farm will adversely affect their air traffic control function and hence impact air safety we would hope that Your Energy will see the futility of continuing with their application and withdraw it, thus removing the stress and worry hanging over 20,000 local residents. However on past experience of their consideration for the views of local people this may be optimistic!!

Have your say - October 20th marked the end of the Public Consultation Period. However, KEEP WRITING TO THE PLANNERS after this date. They will still take note of your views and as a community we need the maximum number of letters objecting before the Planning Committee meets in January/February 05. Full details on submitting comments are available in the Get Involved section.