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Do you believe what is presented by the developer in their Planning Application by way of visualisations? We hope not! - Stationary grey turbines against a grey landscape are not a realistic representation
Have you ever used the turbine wire-frame model from a specific viewpoint for which your are advised to “View flat at a comfortable arm's length. If viewing this image on a screen, enlarge to full screen height “? Probably not!
Many Caithness residents can tell you that turbines do not have to be close to be highly visible. The weather conditions can often result in distant turbines being highlighted in the evening sun. There have been many studies into onshore wind turbines' visibility. The extent to which turbines intrude into the landscape depends on several factors including distance, terrain, weather conditions, and lighting. Also turbines are more noticeable as they are large moving elements in the landscape. The usual method of presenting fixed image visualisations does not provide a realistic impression of the effect of turbines in the landscape. All summed up by this quote from a public authority participant
“They all produce visualisations in some form to show what they [wind turbines] are going to look like. But what you find when they go up is that they are far more visible than you thought they were going to be”
Save Caithness prefers to focus on areas of visual disturbance such as for the Lychrobbie turbines proposal near Latheronwheel. Reasonably accurate scaling was achieved by reference to the existing 34.5m turbine in the landscape adjacent to the proposed site. (To get a larger view of this or other images, right-click on image and select Open Image in New Tab)
We use a similar approach for other energy applications by colouring all of the site being referred to. This alerts people to the possible future extent of an industrialised area rather than just what is included in the current application. Examples include our banner headline for Mey BESS and the ‘Banniskirk in Wick’ map.
Our most recent visualisations are for the Swarclett/Lochquoy/Olrig Hill applications. The view east uses our visual disturbance approach and is the banner at the top of this page.
For the view from the west shown below, we have extended the visualisation prepared by the No to Swarclett team by adding the Lochquoy and Olrig Hill turbines. There is an article on how they did it. The new version was able to make use of the known size of the transmitter antenna on Olrig Hill to appropriately scale the new turbine images. To locate the turbine positions required the further map work shown .
Finally - we dabble in AI. Here is an example that was created (by ChatGPT) due to the applicant for Lochquoy making what we thought was a big deal about the presence of smaller turbines in the vicinity and the lower rotor speed of the large turbine . The AI request was “Create a full frame 75mm focal length image of two turbines both 800m from the viewpoint in a rural setting; turbine one has a total height of 24.6m and rotor diameter of 13m; turbine two has a total height of 149.9m and a rotor diameter of 130m.” Some adjustment to the scale of the smaller turbine was required but the result is close enough to illustrate the 6x difference in height and the 10 times difference in rotor diameter of the larger turbine - and that slower rotation speed is unlikely to be of value to anyone!
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