Na h-Eileanan an Iar
Na h-Eileanan an Iar has 254 MW of clean power (all onshore wind) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 222,000 homes. When the wires are too full to carry the power, Britain pays wind farms to switch off instead. No wind farm here is paid that way — almost all of it goes to wind farms in Scotland. That cost is shared across every bill in Britain, so households here pay for it too: about £92 a year per household, £1.2m across the constituency's 12,717 homes. There is also 38 MW of wind running here on the local network. If that gets switched off, no national record shows it.
Ranks 14 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stornoway Wind Farm (second resubmission)EDF Renewables UK / ESB | Onshore wind | 196 MW171,000 homes | Approved 5 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref ECU00001850 |
| Sandwick East Community Wind FarmAquatera | Onshore wind | 50 MW44,000 homes | Waiting 7.3 years for a planning decisionWho can move it: Na h-Eileanan Siar Council · planning ref 9/00189/PPDM |
| Druim Leathann WindfarmBaywa R.E. UK Limited | Onshore wind | 48 MW42,000 homes | Cannot connect to the grid until 2027, 5 years after it was approvedWho can move it: the grid operator (NESO) and SSEN Transmission · earliest connection 2027 · planning ref 18/00216/PPDM |
| Battery Point, Newton Street - Battery Energy Storage ParkPoint & Sandwick Trust | Battery | 25 MW | Approved a year ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref 24/00155/PPDM |
| Beinn Thulabaigh Wind TurbineKnock and Swordale Community Company | Onshore wind | 5 MW4,400 homes | Approved 6 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref 19/00209/PPW |
Compared with its neighbours
| Constituency | Approved, not built | Running | Paid to switch off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Na h-Eileanan an Iar | 254 MW | 38 MW | not visible |
| Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross | 938 MW | 1,306 MW | £36m |
| Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire | 453 MW | 1,272 MW | £41m |
| Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey | 642 MW | 525 MW | £17m |
Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross next door has 938 MW waiting, more than Na h-Eileanan an Iar's 254 MW.
The rest of the briefing
- Every approval each project still needs, and which of them the public can see
- What building them would mean here — community payments, business rates and construction work
- Drafted parliamentary questions and letters, filled in with this seat's figures
- 3 story angles for local reporting
- A two-page PDF, and a newsroom edition with the references and who to call
Everything above needs no account, and neither does the full seat page, the method or this constituency's raw data. The account covers the packaged briefing and its PDF, and nothing else.