Most onshore wind projects don’t fail because of the engineering. They fail, or slip by months and lose money, because of the land underneath them: an owner nobody identified, a delivery route that turns out to run through someone’s farmyard, an agreement left too late and signed on the developer’s back foot.
None of that is unpredictable. It’s just easy to miss if you’re not looking for it early enough. Our new Onshore Wind brochure, which you can read in full below, is built around exactly that: finding land risk before it finds you.
Here’s the shape of it.
First, is the land even viable?
Before a project goes anywhere, our GIS team runs it through a two-stage suitability model: ruling out land with hard constraints, then ranking what’s left by risk and suitability. It’s the difference between spending months on a site that was never viable and knowing that on day one.
Next, who actually owns it?
This is land referencing: searching HMLR, the Scottish Land Register, the General Register of Sasines and the Crofting Register, and confirming ownership and current contact details for everyone with an interest. Where land is unregistered, which happens more than people expect, it means site visits and door knocking. There’s no shortcut, and skipping it is how ownership disputes surface halfway through construction instead of before it.
It’s a pleasure working with the Blackhall & Powis Geospatial team. Whether it be bespoke modelling to assist our search for sites or robust land referencing to identify landowners, the team consistently deliver to a high standard and are always on hand to help. It’s been particularly impressive to see their adoption of innovation and automation to enable them to provide invaluable national scale insights into land.
After that, can you actually get a turbine there?
Turbine components are abnormal loads, and the delivery route rarely sits entirely on the developer’s own land. If you wait too long, third-party agreements for that route get expensive fast: it’s not uncommon to see developers agree to eye-catching, market-shifting terms to protect a delivery date. Our Route to Delivery process works through this in ten defined stages, or “pinch points”, starting with swept path analysis and ending in signed option and lease agreements, so the negotiation happens on your terms and your timeline, not under pressure.
It’s supported 22 wind farm projects across Scotland, negotiated on hundreds of pinch points, and backed a pipeline of 1.4GW of wind generation over nine years.
And finally, before anyone signs, invests, or buys
For developers, investors and asset owners, this all comes together as due diligence: reviewing titles, option agreements and leases for gaps or terms outside market expectations, checking access and grid rights against what’s actually on the ground, and delivering a RAG-rated view of what could still go wrong. It’s the same question as everything above it, just asked at the point of committing capital: has the land risk actually been dealt with, or has it just not surfaced yet?
“Blackhall and Powis have supported us for many years, from site organisation to the acquisition of land rights. Their unmatched knowledge of, and reach within, the UK market... has without doubt played a key role in our successes.”
Land risk doesn’t announce itself at any of these stages. It just sits there until somebody goes looking, and the projects that get built on time are usually the ones where somebody did.
Read the full brochure
Our brochure below covers all of this in more detail, including our full development constraints methodology and site origination work.
If you’d rather talk it through in person, we’re at Stand D14 at the Scottish Onshore Wind Conference today and tomorrow.
The water sector is entering a major period of investment over the next few years. With a potential £104bn programme across England and Wales and Scottish Water delivering a £6bn+ investment cycle, the scale of projects to be built, upgraded and maintained is huge.
It’s exciting, but water companies will be under significant pressure to deliver on time and on budget. Working with the right partners will be key, and that’s where we come in. Our water service has the depth of experience and expertise to support this transformation in the water industry over the coming years.
Diving into the challenge
At B&P, we don’t shy away from a challenge, instead, we dive right in. We get under the surface, embedding ourselves in projects to work in partnership with our clients from early-stage strategy all the way through to project construction.
We know the biggest challenge for water projects is land. Major infrastructure projects stall when land can’t be accessed, negotiations drag on or complex title issues emerge halfway through a programme. Our whole approach is built around solving these problems to keep projects moving.
How we keep water projects flowing
We head all of this off at the outset with detailed land referencing and GIS modelling to identify and mitigate access issues and establish a detailed land strategy.
At the heart of our approach is our extensive expertise in stakeholder engagement and negotiation. We understand how to build and maintain relationships with the right people – the landowners, planning authorities, and statutory body stakeholders. Being a specialist third party, we can engage on behalf of water companies in a way that’s constructive and independent – often making conversations easier and reaching agreements more quickly than if the client were negotiating directly.
Our core service brings together:
- GIS and land referencing
- Land acquisition
- Rights negotiation and compensation claims
- Stakeholder engagement
- Project management
- Valuation
- DCO and CPO support for larger programmes
As well as a dedicated team with deep experience in working with water companies across the whole of the UK, B&P has an extensive background in utilities, energy and renewables projects.
An agile approach across the UK
With an agile team and offices across the UK, we’re well-positioned to support projects in England, Wales and Scotland. We’re also building a network of strategic partnerships so we can easily and quickly scale up to support the biggest programmes in the sector.
If you have a water sector project on the horizon, no matter the scale, we’d love to hear from you.
Contact us
Gill Froud, Land Assembly Director: Gill.Froud@blackhallpowis.com
Linda Turner, Director of Water Infrastructure: Linda.Turner@blackhallpowis.com