The Project

About the planning process

Moel Chwa Energy Park includes up to 12 turbines which will be 200m from base to tip, representing the latest technology in the onshore wind sector.

This project is deemed a Development of National Significance (DNS), meaning that we will need to submit an application to the Planning and Environment Decisions Wales (PEDW). PEDW will assess our application and then make a recommendation to Welsh Ministers, who will make the final decision.

As part of our application we will be conducting two phases of consultation, where we will be collecting the views and feedback of local residents, stakeholders and other interested parties, as well as engaging with consultees like Conwy County Borough Council, Denbighshire County Council, Natural Resources Wales, and others.

The feedback we receive during both phases of our consultation will be collated and responded to in a Pre-Application Consultation report, which will also set out in detail what we have done to engage with local residents and stakeholders. This report will then be submitted to PEDW as part of our planning application.

About the Overhead Line (OHL)

Bute Energy has an agreement in place with National Grid to connect to the electricity grid at a proposed new substation near Gwyddelwern.

The OHL corridor runs across land in the Denbighshire County Council administrative boundaries. As such, we will be engaging with the local council as well as residents and stakeholders in both Conwy and Denbighshire to understand their views.

The connection to the grid will be via an Overhead Line (OHL), which will be made up of wood poles, similar to the images below. The wood poles will blend in more sympathetically to the local landscape and will ensure that the visual impact of the OHL is reduced.

Based on extensive technical surveys and assessments, we have narrowed down the OHL route to a more defined corridor. We have taken into account a wide variety of constraints, including a number of homes, local ancient woodland, and pockets of protected habitat among other things.

Viewpoints

As part of our early work on assessing the visual and landscape considerations for the project, we have produced some indicative viewpoint visualisations from several locations around the site.