My name is Ciara and I have just completed my BA Geography (Hons) degree at UWE Bristol. I have been successful in securing an internship to join the Wind Energy End of Life Observatory (WEELO) to work on a small project for the next couple of months. The internship entitled ‘Addressing data shortages at the end of-life stage of wind infrastructure: What relevant data can be obtained from the planning process?’ is funded by the CATE Student Internship Fund 2025-2026.   

The UK’s first onshore wind farms went up in the early 1990s. Now, around 30 years later, a lot of them are reaching the end of their consented lives. This has resulted in the decisions about decommissioning (taking turbines down and restoring the land) and repowering (replacing old turbines with newer, often bigger ones) all surfacing at once. I am interested in researching how the planning systems, both on a local and national scale, handle this. 

The Project: 

I’m working through a select set of case study wind farms, from the early 1990s to today and reading what their planning documents actually state in regards to decommissioning and repowering. By researching this, I hope to understand whether this has changed over the decades and if so, how? 

The Aim: To understand how UK onshore wind planning accommodates the end of a wind farm’s life and how that has evolved over the past decades. 

The Objectives: 

• To build a database of onshore wind case studies spanning three decades. 

• Track down planning documents and record how decommissioning and repowering were treated. 

• Score the cases consistently so they can be compared fairly. 

• Understand whether the treatment of repowering and decommissioning has improved over time and what that means for the UK’s ageing fleet. 

I’m looking forward to getting stuck in on such a relevant and engaging topic, check back in to hear what I found!