Online exhibition - February 2022

RES believes in meaningful and effective consultation and we aim to engage early with the local community and key stakeholders in order to facilitate constructive consultation. This helps to identify issues and concerns, as well as benefits and opportunities, which we can then consider when developing a project.

In February 2022, shortly after the Scoping Report was submitted, RES held an online exhibition to gather feedback from the community and local supply chain at an early stage in the project. A range of information was available online, including photomontages to give an impression of what the site could look like from different viewpoints in the area, and hard copies of the information were made available to people upon request.

More than 144 ‘unique visits’ to the online exhibition were recorded during the four-week consultation period and a number of phone and video calls were held with local residents, members of the wider community, and local businesses, who wanted to understand more about the project.

Over 25 comments forms were also received on the proposal and these comments, together with findings from the site survey work and key consultee feedback, have been considered during the refinement of the design.

Public exhibitions – May 2022

In May 2022 RES held public exhibitions in Forss and Thurso to present the final design and gather feedback from the community and local supply chain.

Again, a range of information was presented on exhibition information boards, including photomontages to give an impression of what the site could look like from different viewpoints in the area, and RES staff were on hand to discuss the project with people and answer questions.

A total of 36 people attended the two events, and 19 comments forms were submitted with feedback on the final design.

Feedback – topical breakdown

The feedback received across the two sets of exhibition events in February and May 2022 covered a wide range of topics, and the graph below provides a breakdown:

A more detailed summary of the consultation undertaken and the comments received can be found in the Pre-Application Consultation (PAC) Report which was submitted as part of the planning application.