Landscape and visual impact assessments

Peel’s team has been following best-practice guidance and working with Natural England and the council’s landscape architect to assess the potential effects of the proposed development on the area’s landscape character and local communities.

The assessment used verifiable photography, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) topography data, Ordnance Survey terrain data and computer-generated images to answer the question of how the landscape would change if the wind farm were to be built.

The team has also looked at the potential cumulative development impacts in the area, i.e. what the area might look like if everything that has been granted planning permission or is proposed were to be built.

At our exhibitions in November we showed, using LIDAR data, the zone of theoretical visibility (ZTV) for an area covering the communities around the wind farm site. The environmental statement submitted with the planning application extends this analysis to a much wider area (some 30 km from the site) to show how many turbines might be visible from any point within that area.

It is important to note that the large-scale ZTV does not take account of built features such as buildings; it is compiled using terrain data only. In other words, the visibility of the turbines is somewhat overstated in this diagram, as buildings, trees and other tall objects would disrupt the real-world visibility of the turbines.