New wind turbines to be in action by end of the year

Around 50 children from Millhouse Primary School in Millhouse Green, near Penistone, took a tour of the wind farm with Lewis Stokes and James Connelly from developer Banks Renewables.

Assistant headteacher Matt Ritchie said: “Having the Hazlehead wind farm on our doorstep gives us a great chance to get a close look at some of the things we’ve been talking about in the classroom, and everyone had an extremely interesting and enjoyable day on the site.

“The things we saw and information we gathered will be extremely useful for our work for the rest of the year, and the children are very pleased to have had this chance to visit an actual wind farm.”

Banks Renewables is investing around £10m in the three-turbine Hazlehead wind farm, which should provide enough energy to meet the annual electricity consumption requirements of around 3,400 homes.

The turbines were installed in September and the wind farm should be fully operational and connected to the National Grid before the end of the year.

Mark Dowdall, environment and community director at the Banks Group, added: “The young people who visited the Hazlehead site are part of the generation that will need to meet the challenge of producing the energy that we all consume from sources other than the traditional ones we’ve used for the last century.

“Onshore wind farms have a crucial role to play.”