In a previous post (August 2020) we informed you about the shameful state of the Wind Farm at Laneast in Cornwall which has not been operating for at least 4 years and is a decaying environmental eyesore. We did eventually receive a response from Cornwall County Council to say they were aware of the situation and that the owner of the site had in 2019 received planning permission to upgrade the site. Well nothing has been done!

Following this we asked Cornwall County Council to respond the following Freedom Of Information request:

What is the number of Wind Turbine installations in Cornwall that have a legal commitment to removing the Turbines on end of life and what is the number that have no legal commitment

We received the following response:

Unfortunately the Council does not hold information relating to your request in a way that is retrievable. We have no mechanism for retrieving this information other than going through each application manually. This would obviously be very time consuming and would therefore take us over the time allowances for EIR/FOI requests.

This is clearly an unsatisfactory and worrying response since it means that Cornwall County Council when granting Planning Permission for Wind Turbine installations had no standard policy on decommissioning the Turbines at End of Life!

If this is the case we can expect many more environmental disasters in the making similar to Laneast!

We have now requested under the FOI act that Cornwall County Council undertake an Internal Review of their response our original FOI request. The response from this Internal Review is overdue by 2 weeks!

Wind Turbines should not be allowed to decay at End Of Life. Apart from the environmental eyesore they contain valuable materials, such as rare earths, and should be recycyled.

We will not let this matter rest!