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.