Whitelee is an onshore wind farm on Eaglesham Moor in East Renfrewshire, south of Glasgow: 322 MW, 140 turbines, with the first phase operational since December 2007. The applicant in the REPD is listed as CRE Energy / Scottish Power. Because the capacity exceeds 50 MW, the decision was taken by Scottish Ministers under Section 36 of the Electricity Act, bypassing the council. The database's information on it is out of date: the Whitelee record was last updated on 20 May 2010.
How Whitelee got consent and was built
The application was submitted on 23 January 2002. Section 36 consent from the Scottish Government came on 1 April 2006, after 218 weeks. For comparison: across all 334 decided applications to the Scottish Government, the median time awaiting a decision was 127 weeks, and 18% were refused. So Whitelee waited considerably longer than usual, but once consent was granted things moved quickly: construction began on 1 December 2006, and the wind farm started generating on 14 December 2007. How Section 36 decisions work in general is set out on the Scotland page.
Extensions and other projects nearby
Extensions are recorded in the database as separate projects, so you cannot add their capacity to the first phase as a single figure. Whitelee Windfarm Extension Phase 1 at 108 MW and Phase 2 at 109 MW are operational, both between 0.7 and 5.2 km from the original site. A third phase (Phase 3) of 12 MW was refused on appeal. Within a 10 km radius there are other wind farms, as well as the Whitelees Hydrogen Production Facility: hydrogen production with a 40 MW solar component and 50 MW of battery storage, approved but not built. All projects in the area are listed on the East Renfrewshire page, and neighbouring sites can be found via postcode district, for example KA17 (Darvel). Statuses and dates here come from the July 2026 extract of the REPD; the database may lag behind decisions, and decisions made after the extract are not shown on the site.