Brighton i360 has applied for planning permission to remove a wind turbine at the top of the tower from its design, as the engineers have raised concerns that the turbine might cause the tower to move in high winds. Here are some of your questions answered.

Q: Why this has only come up now?

A: In the very early designs of the tower, we had proposed including a wind turbine at the top, however detailed studies by our damping specialist showed that the wind turbine (with a mounting on the roof of the tower) would have stopped the tower damping system from working properly and the turbine itself would have been susceptible to damage.

Q: Do the dampers matter?

A: An important aspect of the tower design has been to ensure that it can withstand very high winds in the worst possible storms. To deal with these conditions there are damping systems mounted internally within the tower and the exterior of the tower is clad with perforated aluminium cladding, which disrupts the fl ow of the wind.

Q: So the i360 won’t be generating energy?

The wind turbine was expected to generate around 20% of the energy for the vertical cable car’s ascent, but by capturing energy on the vertical cable car descent, we will recover approximately 50% of the energy for the ascent, so we will be saving more energy than originally envisaged.

Q: What about the rainwater harvesting - why do you want to remove that?

A: The Council added the proposal for rainwater harvesting from the roof in the early stages of our planning application. Now that our plans have been submitted, with our beach building directly below our passenger boarding area, it is clear to see that there is no real roof in which we can catch rainwater.

Q: What are you doing to counteract this loss?

A: We are going to use a food digester that will turn our food waste into water, which can then go straight back into the water system. 70% of food waste is water and using this method will not only return water back to be reused, it will reduce our carbon footprint - less trucks and less landfi ll.

Q: Will there be any other planning changes?

A: Yes. Our planning consent was given 9 years ago and inevitably our thinking has evolved in some areas and our design team have found some elements have needed to be altered to make sure the i360 is built to last.

We applied for consent to rebuild the arches last year, as we discovered that they were irreparable. This was consented, and had the support of the West Pier Trust and English Heritage. We will also be submitting an application later this year to tweak the designs of our beach building in terms of the internal layout and uses.

Decision to remove wind turbine explained: i360 will now save more energy