Broadview meeting

Broadview Energy have booked Helmdon School on 13 July for their second public consultation. We believe that Broadview will present a range of photo montages at this open evening alongside details of where the final locations of the turbines will be. They will be publicising this meeting in due course.

As previously mentioned, Broadview were taken to the Advertising Standards Authority recently over photos that they produced for a wind farm proposal in Leicestershire. The ASA agreed with the local Action Group that the photos produced were misleading because they seriously under represented the size of the turbines and therefore the visual impact.

There are rules about how these photos should be produced. However even within the guidelines there are many "tricks" which developers employ because it is in their interest to make the turbines look as small as possible. Typical tricks include:

- Using large immediate foreground objects to detract from the size of the turbines in the background or taking photos without a frame of reference in for scale: eg cars/houses near the turbines.

- Taking hardly any photos from the immediate vicinity where the impact is most severe and instead concentrating on shots 10-20km away.

- Using open landscape panoramic shots - elongating the picture detracts from the turbine scale and size.

- Shrinking photos down and then not informing people that photos need to be viewed at a certain distance if they have been shrunk down.

A recent report on the Wind Industry's photo montages concluded that:

...developers reduce the visual effect by making the turbines look between three to four times further away from the actual viewpoint in terms of the public's interpretation of the images".

HSGWAG discovered a couple of months ago that Broadview had originally only suggested one photograph from Helmdon in their preliminary conversations with SNC. HSGWAG provided feedback that we wanted to see a range of photos taken in the immediate vicinity. We specified 10+ locations, so we will be interested to see what the final result is at the public consultation.