Representation by Louise Fincham
- Date submitted
- 8 January 2020
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
We have lived at Clouting's Farm for 26 years. We wish to object in the strongest terms to SPR's plans to build the onshore infrastructure for its EA2 Offshore wind farm in the fields behind our house. We support the representations being made by SASES and Friston PC. The site that SPR have chosen is in pristine open countryside. Surrounded by Grade II and Grade II* listed buildings and the medieval village of Friston. SPR have paid no attention to the objections raised by residents, parish, town and local councils and our MP. No modern design techniques have been used to try to produce a "low impact" design. A substation in Rampion W Sussex was built to a maximum height of 8m. We have been frustrated by the lack of accountability of National Grid. National Grid decided that the power generated by EA1N and EA2 should connect in "the Sizewell area". National Grid then left it up to SPR to find a connection point apparently anywhere along the pylon route. A flawed RAG assessment ended with a decision to build near Friston. The RAG assessment was skewed to give the answer to a decision that had already been made, red warnings that were applied to buildings at other sites were not applied to the Grade II listed building near Friston. In the plans submitted to the planning inspector the village of Friston has been airbrushed out of the picture. Documents appear and then disappear on the SPR website making it very difficult for residents to keep track of what the plans are. The cumulative affect of at least 6 different energy infrastructure projects is not being acknowledged. Creating a 83 acre industrialised zone in the middle of open countryside cannot be the way to proceed with Green energy production. SPR have already carved a 30km long 50m wide trench from Bawdsey to Bramford but inexplicably downgraded the trench so it apparently cannot now house the cables from EA1N or EA2. The village of Friston and this whole precious area of East Suffolk is to be sacrificed because of flawed decision making and bad planning. Benjamin Britten would be turning in his grave. The well known and internationally renowned Snape Maltings concert and music school lies less than 3 miles from the proposed site. Visitors to seaside towns like Aldeburgh and Thorpness will be put off from by the traffic, noise and light pollution that will be produced. The coastline where landfall will be made is AONB land and is supposedly protected. AONB land will be severed, this cannot be right. In his autobiography "Master of None" published in 2009, Major Douglas Goddard described "life on the farm". Major Goddard spent his youth working at Clouting's Farm and described walking every Sunday from Clouting's Farm to the Methodist Church in Knodishall. He walked along the ancient footpath (P6) that forms the boundary of Knodishall and Friston parishes. It is a pilgrim way and it is to be destroyed by SPR's plans. The substations will cut right through the footpath and the path is to be re-routing looping around the substation and then running along parallel to Grove road. The contrast with the existing path that runs pleasantly from our house through fields to the village of Friston could not be more stark. The area is totally unsuited to major development. Quite apart from the rural nature of the site itself the roads are little more than country lanes, two cars cannot pass let alone HGVs and associated construction traffic. Mill Road and Grove road are both part of the national cycle route and are used by the annual Suffolk Churches "Ride and Stride" event which has now been running for 30 years. Cyclists are not going to be able to use these roads when they are full of construction traffic and even after construction no one is going to want to cycle past an industrial wasteland humming with substation noise. The village of Friston will be split in two, one side of the B1121 being an industrial site and the other side marooned and cut off from the Church and village hall. Friston is well within the Sizewell "evacuation zone" and yet no assessment has been made as to the safety impact of having narrow country lanes clogged up with construction traffic. There is also no consideration as to the security risk associated with having a large percentage of the nations electricity running through such a rural and remote site. Electricity substations are vulnerable targets and would be hard to protect in a setting such as Friston. SPR deny that the substation will emit a humming noise and yet the exact same design up and running at Bramford produces an audible and recorded hum. SPR make meaningless concessions like saying they will reduce the height of the harmonic filters from 21m to 18m, this is achieved by removing a noise proofing cladding so we simply swap a height reduction for more noise pollution. Everyone who looks at the site knows that this is a bad plan, it will provide nothing beneficial to the area. It will destroy our agricultural land and our tourist industry. The plans cannot be viewed in isolation. The inclusion of a National Grid interconnector shows that if permission is given to build on this site we will be turning this whole ancient and precious landscape into an industrial zone. Please come and visit the site and see for yourselves, there must be a better way of doing this.