Slieve Rushen Wind Farm

The Slieve Rushen wind farm, formerly owned by the Quinn Group, was recently sold for £ 100 million to Platina Partners, a London based company. This is a 54MW wind farm in Fermanagh that sells electricity to Northern Ireland in the single electricity market.

In 2008, it was revamped with 18 new Vestas V90 wind turbines and its capacity factor has been over 30% ever since. This is not surprising since it is in one of the windiest locations in the country on top of Slieve Rushen mountain.  

Records from SEM-O show that it received € 10.7 million euros in 2012 from the market in energy and capacity payments. The accounts of the company (Mantlin Ltd) are available for download in the UK companies office. These show a turnover of £ 15.6m for 2012. This converts to about € 19.3m when using the average conversion rate during the year. This means that the company receives renewable obligation credits, levy exemption certificates and curtailment and constraint payments (payments from UK grid to stop producing power) in the region of € 8.5m in total. This is quite a vast sum for activities unrelated to the generation of electricity. However, accounts show that the wind farm would have made an operating loss of £3 million as opposed to an operating profit of £3.8 million without these sources of income.

There is one more notable thing that sticks out when you read the accounts. On Note number 7, it states that the company had no employees during the year. The wind industry makes lots of claims about the number of jobs it creates, but here is one of the largest wind farms in the country employing the grand sum total of Zero employees.