Local Plan timetables overtaken by grid decarbonisation

Consultation for the Regulation 19 draft of our new Local Plan for Winchester District closed a few days ago. Although this phase has been “accelerated” in response to the new government’s priority for planning reform, the most optimistic completion date is the end of 2025. The process commenced in 2018.

Recent headlines about Local Plans have been prompted by the government’s efforts to inject its new mandates for housebuilding. 1.5 million new homes are promised within the current parliament.

A similar stretch target (2030) has been set for decarbonisation of the electricity grid, supported by amendments to the National Planning Policy Framework. But government guidance for Local Plan preparation has been framed solely to “ensure plans contribute positively to our ambition of delivering 1.5m homes.” Options for local authorities are dictated by the housing mandate numbers, not by new demands on local energy infrastructure.

Of course, local authorities are programmed to associate land use change with housing development. Precise numbers, divided between specific parish and urban locations, are the bread and butter content of Local Plans. The demands of renewable energy, not to mention commitments to biodiversity, rewilding and reforestation, generally struggle to make the leap from policy to spatial detail. Landowners are partly to blame for reinforcing this mindset in their responses to the planners’ calls for sites to earmark for development.

No one could plead ignorance of the steeply rising curve of demand for energy infrastructure. The 6th carbon budget of the Climate Change Committee in 2020 outlined why it would be necessary to achieve grid decarbonisation by 2035, many years in advance of net zero 2050. Jolted by the 2022 energy crisis the Conservative government eventually agreed. Ed Miliband has now advanced this further to 2030.

The imminent targets for UK solar and onshore wind are exponential, compelling wide distribution across rural areas. And the rationale has extended beyond climate change to address national energy security and the cost of living.

This sense of scale and urgency is missing from the new Winchester Local Plan. Some of the recent government decisions arrived too late for consideration in the drafting. Nonetheless, in my response to the consultation I’ve highlighted the mismatch between the frantic mobilisation implied by national goals for renewable energy and sluggishly vague Local Plans. A sympathetic inspector may pick it up as an issue for wider consideration.

I’ve also tried to sort out the muddled preamble text (paras 4.40 & 4.41) to the key policy CN5 for renewable energy. It stumbles in citing a 2008 report, hopelessly outdated on this topic. The text of 4.41 does helpfully indicate the need for “a sixfold increase of local solar farm capacity” but omits any reference to wind turbine potential. This was my suggested wording, attempting to retain as much of the original as possible:

4.40: The generation of renewable and low carbon energy will help to contribute to national targets and the council’s climate emergency. A 2022 Renewable Energy Study by Winchester Action on the Climate Crisis showed that there is potential for local renewable generation to match local consumption of electricity in a future net zero scenario. The Study suggested that the greatest potential for renewable and low carbon energy schemes in the part of the district that is located outside of the South Downs National Park is from solar energy generation, alongside a contribution from wind turbines.

4.41 (add a further bullet point, quoted from the Study):

“It will be necessary to activate the potential for wind energy that exists within the District.”

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Winchester District Local Plan

Renewable Energy in Winchester District 2023

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