BT goes green with multi-million pound wind turbine project

LONDON - BT Group Plc, Britain's largest telecoms operator, plans to build wind turbines across the country in a 250 million pound ($509 million) project to generate one quarter of its power needs by 2016.

BT, one of Britain's biggest consumers of energy, said on Thursday it had submitted planning applications to erect three, 50 metre test turbines in Goonhilly, in England's western county of Cornwall, and on the Scottish islands of Orkney and Shetland.

"There is a pressing need for industry to cut carbon in ways that makes business sense," said BT Finance Director Hanif Lalani. "BT has already achieved a 60 percent reduction in its carbon emissions and is committed to reducing them further to 80 percent by 2016.

"Our wind energy plans play an important part in reaching that target."

In what BT called the largest corporate wind power project in Britain -- and possibly Europe -- by a non-energy company, the group plans to build around 120 turbines across the country on, or adjacent to, windy land it already owns.

BT, which hopes to start generating power from 2012, said it planned to raise third-party funding for the project from renewable energy partners, which would prevent the cost of the plans ending up on its own balance sheet.


LOCAL COMMUNITIES

The main opponents of such wind farms are local inhabitants, who argue the massive turbines are noisy and spoil views, although concerns have also been raised by bird lovers worried they might interfere with the flight paths of migrating birds.

BT said it was "very keen" to ensure that local communities were aware of and backed its plans to dig deeper into green energy sources to combat climate change.

BT hopes its wind farms will generate 250 megawatts of electricity -- enough to meet the power needs of 122,000 homes -- preventing the release of 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year compared with coal generation. This is equivalent to a quarter of a million return air trips between London and New York.

BT, which said it already buys the bulk of UK energy generated by renewable sources, said it would feed the power from its turbine farms into Britain's power distributor, the National Grid, and then buy it back.

The company faces an annual electricity bill of about 150 million pounds, but a spokesman said the company was likely to be able to buy its own generated electricity back on "favourable terms compared to the market price".

Although BT is focusing on onshore wind farms, which it says have a well-established and predictable planning process and business case, it did not rule out branching out into solar or offshore power generation projects in the future.

The British government subsidises the renewable energy market by roughly 500 million pounds per year and, although turbines have sprung up across parts of the country, there have been delays in clinching planning permission and linking up projects to the national power grid.

Nevertheless, the country's goal remains to generate around 10 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2010, up from just under five percent currently. By 2020, the government hopes to generate 20 percent of power from green sources.