Sustainability and Environment

Protecting, restoring and enhancing biodiversity

Managing the environmental impacts of our assets is a key aspect of our transmission network in this time of significant change, elevated public opinion and increased legislative requirement. Full environmental impact assessments or appraisals are conducted as part of planning applications and our environmental team works hard to develop optimal solutions that consider the environment and our stakeholders.

Once our projects are completed our operations team, who are responsible for the operation and maintenance of the asset during its life, receive an environmental handover pack with details all of the known constraints so that should any maintenance be required it can be undertaken with due regard to the environment.

Preserving our visual amenities

We recognise that our activities will almost inevitably have an environmental impact. In the case of renewable generation, the less favourable visual impact is often outweighed by the overall environmental benefit of the resulting lower carbon generation. At the planning stage we make every effort to understand how the natural environment can be used to screen and lessen visual impact, and where possible, we use natural contours, gullies and ridges.

Minimising our carbon footprint

We recognise that as well as assisting others to achieve their low carbon objectives, there are also measures that we can implement ourselves to minimise our carbon footprint and the possible impacts of greenhouse gases on society.

As a growing business we are working to develop an appropriate solution to allow us to accurately report our carbon footprint in an open and transparent way that allows stakeholders to understand our year-on-year performance against a background of business growth.

We have targeted a 2% reduction year-on-year across our building energy usage and transport functions.