Proposal and EIA activities assignment details
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The EIA Exercise – Windfarm development on campus (this is a theoretical exercise!)
The University is considering building a windfarm of 20 MW capacity on the slopes around Dumyat to produce its electricity and to sell any excess power to the national grid. There will need to be a short power line running down to the campus where a small substation will be built over by the gardens and estates/glasshouses on campus. This will also form the connection to the national grid. The university has not yet decided on the size of the wind turbines to use and the alternative options need to be considered against the various environmental impacts that are anticipated. There are two parts to this assignment:
In part 2: you will need to conduct activities to enable you draft a non‐technical summary (as a group) for the project development. Note that as individuals you are asked to write your 3500 word report on one or more topics selected from the following impacts:
Air quality
Ecology
Heritage and Archaeology
Landscape and visual impacts
Noise
Socio‐economic
Soils, geology and geomorphology
Transport
Water quality
You are expected to identify all potential environmental impacts for your topic(s) and explain which ones are likely to be significant for the different turbine options and how these will be mitigated. The group work component (a further 500-1000 words per person) should ‘top and tail’ the EIA non technical summary and also discuss and describe things like the alternatives that might apply once you have worked through your individual sections and identified what the significant impacts may be and therefore what mitigation may take place through changing to a different alternative form of the development etc. Another point you might like to do as a group is to write out your measures for significance etc. so all individual sections use the same terminology.
You are expected to make use of available resources but should not contact, for example, Stirling Council etc
Additional notes for the report:
The report is really a hybrid between a true non-technical summary and a full environmental impact assessment. This is because I would like you to use the simplified style of an NTS but clearly the NTS is a summary of the EIA itself whereas you have been ‘doing’ an EIA in terms of the evaluation of the alternatives and coming to a decision on the best option to propose. Therefore, you should have additional data that would not normally appear in an NTS. I would like you to report on these EIA activities through and recommend you use appendices to do so.
For the structure, I am expecting something like the following (although the actual structure is down to you to decide):
Introduction (group)
Outline of the development (group)
Brief summary of the activities undertaken (group)
Then a more detailed breakdown of the activities by topic (individual) which will include the identification of any significant impacts with options for mitigation based on the individual section
Then a pulling together of the identified significant impacts and the alternative options for the design (group)
Final recommendations (group)
Appendices
As I said the above is for guidance only but gives you an idea of what I’m looking for and expecting. If you find a different but good EIA structure that you want to follow that’s great.
Word count for the individual sections: I don’t really give word counts for this work because some sections might only require 500 words, others 5000 or more. Therefore as a group you need to work out the balance of effort needed relative to the potential impact of the development and align the word count accordingly. That said, I also don’t want to read 100,000 words in each report. Each person in the group should contribute in the region of 3000-3500 words (as indicated in the module outline) that should give you some idea of the overall length that I’m expecting. Given that the report is worth 50% of your grade it therefore needs to be a substantial piece of work hence the 3000-3500 words equivalent each plus the word count for the group work activities.
Remember too that not everything has to go into the individual sections so for example you might consider landscape and visual to be an important topic to consider and worthy of say 5000 words – my advice would be that the person responsible for landscape and visual would write 3000 words on the methods, data and identification of the significant impacts but that as a group you discuss and write the overall approach to the mitigation options for all issues with the identified significant impacts (I would be expecting you to do this anyway) but this would then account for the extra 2000 words if landscape and visual were the biggest issue to be discussed. Likewise if you are responsible for the smaller impacts then you might need to write 1000 words on two impacts, and 1500 on a third etc.
REMEMBER to clearly mark who has done what in the report – for sections written as a group then write ALL or add everyone’s ID number, everywhere else on the individual sections you should write your student ID number.
I will keep an eye on the discussion board on Canvas and will only answer questions through this on the pieces of work. However please feel free to send me an email asking me to check the discussion board if I have not responded within 72 hours.
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