Wind Turbine and Wind Farm TV Interference Modelling and Baseline TV Signal Surveys

We have developed specialist computer modelling software to assess the potential impacts of a wind farm, wind turbines or just one single wind turbine upon the reception and operation of television services. Even though the UK’s terrestrial television network is now fully digital (the last terrestrial analogue transmissions ceased during 2012), wind turbines can cause significant disruption to the reception of digital terrestrial television (DTT) services; Freeview in the UK, Saorview in Ireland. Since 2006, we have modelled television reception impacts for SSE Renewables, Dulas Limited, RES Group, RWE Innology UK Limited, Belltown Power Limited, Natural Power Consultants, Scottish Power, Galloper Offshore Wind Farm, PEP / Pure Energy Professionals, St Breock Limited / REG, Seren Energy, AECOM, Blue Energy, Ecotricity, Engena, Norvento, Engena, REG, Pennant Walters and others.

The impact modelling takes into account; the number of turbines, the heights of the towers and the rotor diameters; the radar cross sectional area of the turbine blades; the transmission path from the television transmitter to the wind farm site and beyond; digital terrain modelling; the transmit antenna patterns and effective radiated powers (ERPs); receiver antenna discrimination and performance; and free space radio path loss.

The produced technical report can be used to support a planning application, to discharge an associated planning condition, or for the inclusion in a EIA submission. If specified in the planning condition, the report would also detail the baseline television / radio reception data (from a signal survey) to assist in the identification of the source of any future interference. The impact modelling can be presented in a GIS / mappable format (MapInfo TAB files) and will indicate areas of interference severity and also postcode data to assist project managers understand how many potentially affected households exist, where they are located and overall mitigation costs.

The issued report would include mapping and data licensed from Ordnance Survey (OS) under the terms of the Open Government Licence; OS data Crown copyright and database copyright (2023).