Parish Council agrees with a need for clean energy but favours alternative pylon route

A parish council in the borough is leading a petition to gather signatures to support a proposal to counter National Grid plans to run a new pylon route through the borough.

It comes as officials in Morley mount their own campaign against the scheme which involves miles of installations and runs of overhead lines across UK counties - and locally, a project links Chesterfield to Willington via the Erewash borough, with section 3 running from Ripley to Morley.

However, a fourth section would run from Morley to Ockbrook and a fifth section from Ockbrook, leaving Erewash and running to and through Aston-on-Trent. 

Following a consultation from May to September 2024, stages of the project run through to construction in 2028 and anticipated completion in 2031.

Referencing a report, a petition launched by Ockbrook & Borrowash Parish Council says that after "serious" analysis and consideration, the Parish of the two villages agrees with a need for more clean energy to be distributed around the country, but that a proposed route detailed as 'EDN1' is "much preferred" to another 'EDN2' for many reasons which it said were detailed within the report.

It said that EDN1;

• costs the tax payer £20,000,000 LESS than EDN2
• is shorter and therefore would have less [of] an environmental impact
• performs marginally better than EDN2 - something it said was reflected on page 89 of National Grid's own report.

The petition claims that the overall conclusions of National Grid as written are "subjective", adding "...there is no weighting given to different elements nor is there a scoring system that would provide a means of ranking these options."  it calls for a discussion of such a weighting system as a part of a public consultation in order to obtain usable data.

The wording of the petition also details some areas of concern over the extent of noise and "operational noise" with all options, and expressed particular concern about the latter, calling for a more thorough investigation due to the impact on the proximity of residential properties.  The Parish Council accuses National Grid of "dismissing generalities".

It also concluded that the likely outcomes of undertaking more detailed costings does not allow for what it said was a "fact that EDN2 requires approximately 10km of more complex flood plain construction compared with approximately 5km for EDN1", and referenced rough scaling from National Grid Plans in making this statement, and said that there was a likelihood of a further widening of the cost difference.

The petition concludes: "The Parish of Ockbrook and Borrowash request that a full appraisal of EDN1 to Ratcliffe alongside further work on EDN2 is completed to a high standard and transparent professional standard BEFORE the final route selection is made by National Grid".  It added that parish councillors felt that such a full appraisal would further demonstrate that EDN1 was a preferred route for the reasons detailed.

It called for National Grid to follow the EDN1 route over EDN2 and linked through to the National Grid's strategic options report whilst also including a link to a corridor preliminary routing and siting study.