Building windfarm substation at Surfleet Marsh brings ‘number of advantages’ – developers

Building a giant offshore windfarm substation in the area have given developers a ‘number of advantages’.

Outer Dowsing Offshore Wind will construct the substation at Surfleet Marsh, after a location at Weston Marsh was also in the running.

The £7 billion project plans to connect one of the country’s largest windfarms – to be situated in the North Sea – to land at Anderby Creek.

Cabling will travel through a number of villages in our area including including Wyberton, Kirton, Frampton, Fosdyke, Sutterton Dowdyke, Surfleet Seas End before connecting at Surfleet Marsh.

“Surfleet Marsh gives us a number of advantages from an environmental and engineering perspective,” said development manager Chris Jenner.

“It gives us easier access to get on the site via the highway network and also provides natural screening in that area.”

To mask the building a large planting of indigenous trees will be undertaken by Outer Dowsing.

Oak, alder, lime, willow and poplar will be among the 16 varieties of trees planned to be planted, while hedgerows will also be added to the area.

“There’s already a lot of natural screening there which is quite rare for that part of the world, so we’re able to provide supplementary planting proposals which provides additional, screening so the visual impact is best it can,” Mr Jenner added.

“In June and July we consulted on two locations and again looking back, the response from people has been very positive with the reasons we’ve chosen that.”

The autumn consultation – which was held at numerous local venues and online – has now finished, with Outer Dowsing now planning to submit their application early next year.

If successful the scheme for a1.5GW wind farm 54km off the Lincolnshire coast, which will be one of the world’s largest and generate enough energy to power 1.6 million homes, could be up and running by 2030.

It is hoped that hundreds of jobs, from construction to operations and maintenance, will be created by the scheme in the area for decades to come.

Reflecting on the latest consultations, Mr Jenner continued: “It’s been really successful.

“This is our last set of consultations before we submit our application next year and it’s really consolidating the work we’ve done over the last 12 months.

“We’re fine tuning the final elements of our application, making sure the decisions we’ve made over the past 12 months are incorporated.

“People have had the chance to genuinely influence the project over the past 12 months and are seeing the results of those conversations in the way we’ve amended our scheme.

“We’ve listened to people and changed our proposals in response to this. It’s put our minds at rest that we’re able to bring design and mitigation into the scheme to address concerns.”

Throughout the summer months Outer Dowsing have carried out a series of ornothology, ecology, traffic and archaeology surveys in the area.