When we started writing our report on battery storage in Scotland we knew that there was a problem. We had heard from many community members that they were getting the go-ahead on greenbelt land, on woodland sites, and right next to heritage sites, including neolithic rock art. 


However we didn’t realise how bad the situation was until we started to look into it in detail. Our Battery Storage and Planning report found that planning permission for large battery storage installations (decisions for installations over 50MW are made by the Scottish Government’s Energy Consents Unit - ECU) were always granted. A large BESS, up to that time, had never, ever been turned down. We found that decisions routinely disregarded National Planning Framework 4, including not incorporating planning conditions for biodiversity enhancement even when the local authority had requested them