Gwynt y Mor windfarm project to bring 1,250 jobs to North Wales

A thousand construction jobs and hundreds of long-term maintenance roles will be created by a massive wind farm project that will start next year.

The Gwynt Y Môr wind farm will cover 79 square kilometres with 160 turbines and will sit 13km off the Llandudno coast.

In 2011 there will be 1,000 construction jobs created at the Port of Mostyn where the giant windmills will be put together, with up to an estimated 250 permanent jobs to follow.

These will include full-time boat crews, operations and maintenance and turbine technicians based at Mostyn, in Flintshire, said Jim O’Toole managing director of the port company.

The economic boom is due to a 2bn Euro investment in the wind farm, split three-ways between RWE npower renewables, German company Stadtwerke München and communications giant Siemens.

The scheme will be completed in 2014 and produce 576 megawatts of in green energy – enough to power about 400,000 homes.

It will put North Wales at the forefront of a wind power revolution being rolled out across the country.

Critics and campaigners, however, argue that the wind farm will blight the tourist economy and accuse the developers of being “miserly” with their contributions to social initiatives.

But yesterday, speaking at the waterfront, Julia Lynch-Williams, managing director of RWE npower renewables, said: “It’s been a long drawn out process.

“We expected to be done by 2008 but now we’re off. Construction will being in 2011 and will be completed in 2014 but will be power output in 2013.

“There will be on going requirement for ever more jobs and it’s in our interests to use local labour and workers. as it’s more efficient.”

Power will be directed down cables from Gwynt Y Môr, which will sit behind the existing wind farms at Rhyl Flats and North Hoyle, through a sub station at Pensarn and on to the existing substation in St Asaph to boost the national grid.

The scale of the wind farm is smaller than expected.

Original plans were for 250 turbines pumping out 750MW but Ms Lynch-Williams said that the final plans had changed thanks to a combination of circumstances.

She said: “At the planning stage we took a view about what the range of options were open to us. You can’t plan things on this scale in sequence.

“We were in negotiations with several turbine manufacturers and looking at environmental impact at the same time as conducting complex financial negotiations.

“In the end the project that fitted best was the one were announcing.”

RWE eventually settled on the same type of turbine already standing on the Rhyl Flats and North Hoyle wind farms. Standing at 134m when the massive propellers reach the top of their arch, these windmills are the same height at Sydney Harbour Bridge. But while the existing turbines are just 7km off shore, the mid point of Gwynt Y Môr will be 18km from land.

Mike Pritchard, of Save Our Scenery, said: “If there is indeed a convincing argument for these wind farms, and we seriously doubt it, they should be much further away from the coast, especially in tourist areas like North Wales which depends so heavily on tourism.

“Also, guidelines from DTI suggest that for each megawatt produced £1,000 should be reinvested in local social initiatives.

“In this case there’s just £768,000 in total which is miserly given the fact it should be closer to £3m.”

But Secretary of State for Wales, Cheryl Gillan said the announcement was “excellent news.”

She said: “Gwynt y Môr will be one of the single biggest private investment projects ever seen in Wales, creating up to 1,000 quality jobs and contributing many millions of pounds to the regional economy of North Wales. It will also become one of the largest off-shore wind farm projects in Europe.”

Anne Meikle, head of World Wildlife Fund Cymru said: “We have a real opportunity with Gwynt-y-Môr to use the powerful resource off the Conwy coast to help global efforts to fight climate change. .”

Director of Friends of the Earth Cymru, Gordon James, said: “Gwynt y Môr provides an excellent opportunity to boost the green energy revolution that the Welsh Assembly Government is backing.”

- Ends -

8 June 2010

Source: Daily Post