The UK’s largest onshore windfarm will replace its existing turbines with even taller ones.
Scottish Power announced the news to double the generating capacity as it announced increased half-year earnings of £1.7 billion.
The company intends to “repower” the Whitelee windfarm in East Renfrewshire.
This would involve replacing the existing turbines with a smaller number of turbines which stand considerably taller.
Under the plans, the current count of 214 turbines could be reduced to 124, taking its installed capacity from 533MW to over 1GW – making it one of the largest in Europe.
The current generation of turbines, which measure up to 140m tall at blade tip, are reaching the end of their lifespan.
The new ones could reach well above 240 metres at blade tip height.
Scottish Power’s chief executive Keith Anderson said that repowering the site was “critical” for its future.
He told BBC Radio Scotland’s Breakfast programme: “Whitelee is an iconic wind farm, it’s the biggest one in the UK and it’s a huge attraction.”
Asked about the size of the new turbines, he said: “They will be bigger and taller, but you need to put that in context of the landscape.
“It’s a huge open area which was covered with commercial forestry, a lot of which we’ve taken away.
“We’ve turned the environment back to actually more of its natural state.”
He continued: “If we increase the size of the site and the output of the site, then we generate more renewable power for the country, which is a brilliant thing.”
Whitelee windfarm has been open to the public since it was opened in 2008.
Scottish Power says the proposals would take place in three phases to maintain access to the visitor centre.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Donald Trump told Sir Keir Starmer that foxes were becoming too fat to recognise after eating dead birds killed by wind turbines.
Former No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney told the BBC’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast that the Prime Minister “held it together” when the remark was made, while officials in the room were struggling to do so.
The former Downing Street chief of staff also said Mr Trump was “much funnier than I expected him to be”, as he told the BBC a story about the first phone call between the president and Sir Keir.
He told the podcast: “The first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills, and he started saying, ‘Look, Britain’s a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills’. Fine, he was making his point, he’s made that publicly enough times.
“Then he started to say, the windmills are killing your birds, birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds.”
Mr McSweeney added: “At this point the officials that were in the room were barely able to contain themselves, because it was extremely funny, but this was the first call between the Prime Minister and the president, and everyone wanted to be professional, but were struggling to hold it together.
“He went on to say that as the foxes ate so many birds and became lazy, they became fat, and as they became so fat, people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were, because they were too fat. ”
He continued: “This was the first call between the president and Prime Minister. I thought, this is just going to be so, so very, very different.”
Mr Trump has frequently tilted at Britain’s adoption of what he calls “windmills”: the drive to build wind turbines to generate more clean power, at the same time as the North Sea fossil fuel industry winds down.
