By David Siddall

Last updated 15:39, Wednesday, 03 December 2008

A GIANT windfarm offshore to the south of Millom has won planning approval.

Meanwhile the third and latest round of sites being offered for possible windfarms by the Crown Estates includes a site that would be visible some 27 miles from St Bees Head.

Permission for the windfarm west of Duddon Sands was given by the government in November.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently told business leaders in Glasgow: “We need a revolution to reduce our dependency on oil, achieving a low-carbon economy with both greater security of energy supply and greater efficiency of energy.”

Mr Brown, who spoke of a desire to “free Britain from the dictatorship of oil” provided by foreign nations, said the national demand for oil would reduce by 20 per cent by 2020 as a result of energy-saving policies. But he committed the government to extracting as much oil as possible from the North Sea and announced that a 139-turbine wind farm off the Cumbrian coast had been approved.

ScottishPower said the approval of its first offshore wind farm, to be built in the Irish Sea, was a “major step” towards the UK achieving its energy targets, which include supplying 15% of energy supplies from renewable sources by 2020.

The company said offshore energy generation would be essential to Britain meeting its “challenging” targets.

The West of Duddon Sands project, part of the first round of offshore wind farms being developed in the UK, should see 139 turbines generating the equivalent power to the needs of more than 372,000 homes.

Keith Anderson, of ScottishPower Renewables, said: “The project 14km off the coast of Cumbria by Barrow-in-Furness will be connected up to the mainland and the grid at a new substation at Heysham in Lancashire. Two offshore substations will be set up to link up the individual turbines.”

County councillor Norman Clarkson has been outspoken in raising concerns over the spread of windfarms.

The council last month backed his motion calling on the energy secretary to give a commitment to seek to ensure that Government will reduce its over reliance on onshore wind, reduce current wind-related targets and invest, as a matter of urgency, in other low carbon energy generation.

Coun Clarkson said: “This beautiful county, a jewel in the crown of landscapes, is being disfigured and scarred through the obscene bribery to erect wind turbines on every hill and every mountain-top and every vacant plot of wind-swept Cumbrian countryside and coast. These schemes, by virtue of their size, adversely affect both the historic landscape and the seascape patterns of Cumbria and the Solway by introducing intrusive, standardised industrial structures where none has ever existed.”

The News has confirmed that the Crown Estates is suggesting in its third round of potential sites that one potential site is 28 miles off St Bees Head, close to Isle of Man.