E.ON resubmitted its Development Consent Order (DCO) application to the UK’s Planning Inspectorate on 1 March for the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm Project off the south coast of the UK, and at the end of March the Inspectorate made known its decision to accept the application.
The proposed farm will contain 175 turbines with a total installed capacity of 700 MWe, 13 km from the town of Brighton. The 175×4 MW turbines will stand 210 metres to the highest blade tip, and cover and area of 139 sq km.
In January the same application was withdrawn after E.ON discovered some omissions from its documentation and was obliged to carry out further consultation work. These omissions turned out to be a failure to consult two local councils in the area. A spokesperson for Eon said: "There are some local authorities quite some considerable distance away but we are required to consult them but they had been missed out from the original application, so we decided the best thing to do was to withdraw the application.
A final decision on whether consent will be granted will not be made before summer 2014.