Mr. Paul Blount:

From a community perspective, the first priority for us when we design wind farms is that we apply best practice and design them in a way that we do not create genuine noise or shadow flicker issues for communities. It is about getting the design right. As you develop your design, you need to engage with communities to give them the confidence that the design is being done correctly.

A big challenge for us, and I would say we are similar to many other sectors, is the advent of social media and the ease with which misinformation can be spread on social media, and that is something that creates huge challenges for us. In our engagement processes we have to seek to tackle some of that misinformation. That is very challenging but we work incredibly hard to do that.

Covid is an unprecedented public health crisis and it created difficulties in implementing the type of engagement model we would ordinarily have sought to do. We have a team who work incredibly hard to reinvent our approach to engagement in that type of an environment. We are similar to many other developers in this respect. In terms of building virtual tours, we made our project team available to respond to queries. We did a lot in the circumstances to try to adapt to a very difficult situation when the Covid crisis landed.