News & Press
Go-Ahead for Microgeneration | 7 Apr 2008
From 6th April, most microgeneration technologies can be installed for dwellings without planning permission, providing "there is no clear impact on others". These include solar panels, ground source heat pumps and combined heat and power.
In response to last year's consultation from the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) on changes to Permitted Development Rights for Householder Microgeneration, Environmental Protection UK along with the Institute Acoustics, expressed concern about the potential noise, vibration and flicker impact on neighbours and neighbourhoods of micro wind turbines (and also concerns about air source heat pumps).
The announcement of the development of a certification scheme following consideration of consultation responses was encouraging. However, there remains a real risk that allowing installation of micro wind turbines without a greater knowledge of potential impacts could lead to local annoyance, creating a burden for enforcement agencies and undermining the credibility of the technology.
To inform the development of soundly based encouragement of these, still largely untested, technologies, we recommended the following in our consultation response:
- Pilot studies to assess impacts in a variety of situations (could be carried out where turbines have been installed)
- Development of a toolkit to enable an assessment be made of a turbine model's suitability for the site under any proposed rules.
- A phased approach, allowing experience to inform future permissions – for example allowing detached homes first.
We can claim partial success in our stance, in that stand alone turbines have now been given the go-ahead, subject to approval from the EU for the certification scheme. However, Government has indicated to Parliament that, subject to review after two years, neighbours are not to be exposed to levels of noise above 45 decibels.
This is in line with the current WHO Guidelines for community noise outdoors (but way above the expected WHO Night Noise Guidelines for Europe), but exceeds the 40 dB level suggested in the original consultation – which, given responses from the acoustics community is somewhat astounding. We remain unsatisfied that sufficient care has been taken by CLG and BERR to protect the quality of the local environment.