Hurlie Substation Update

Aberdeenshire Council are making SSEN submit new drawings and documents because their initial submission was full of errors. Because of this they are reopening the comments window to the public. This is not the fault of the planning dept. And they have asked us very nicely to not unleash the AI beast.

They have got the message that there is massive public displeasure with the proposal. We have told them that some of us are uncomfortable because in the past SSEN have claimed lack of public engagement as support for the project. The compromise is we are going to organise a petition. If, for sake of argument we get a thousand signatures, it will be a single objection that the council have to deal with, but the report of handling which the planners submit to the councillors before they vote will include the fact that there were 1000 respondents.

At the end of the day we are paying for the council and there is no point annoying them by creating unnecessary work. The petition will be made public in the next few days. All previous objections and comments are still valid. If you missed the opportunity to object to the whole project at Xmas, feel free to object now, we can help you if you want. We would encourage anyone who wants to object to the new stuff or just the fact that SSEN have wasted a whole bunch of public money and people's time to wait for the petition, but there is nothing stopping you objecting yourself. I'll be banging a couple in. We just want to avoid another 2000 objections having to be manually processed again.

The main issues are fairly trivial, their description of the equipment didn't match what they are going to use and wasn't included in the visual impact assessment.

Of course SSEN could have taken more time checking their homework before handing it in, but they were desperate to submit over the Christmas holidays to try and avoid public scrutiny. Over 2000 of you made sure they didn't get away with that.

We will be giving out more info very soon.