Community benefits from wind energy

This week DECC announced a “call for evidence aimed at ensuring that communities secure financial, social and environmental benefit from hosting onshore wind farms”.  At one level this seems to be an excellent idea, but is also comes very shortly after the appointment of new Energy Minister John Hayes. Mr Hayes has actively supported campaigns against proposed wind farms in his Lincolnshire constituency and has stated that he believes that wind turbines have a “detrimental impact” on local communities.

So who’s this evidence for? And who’s going to be there to listen with an open mind? Energy Secretary Edward Davey and the ever-enthusiastic Greg Barker may be pro-wind but how far will that stretch beyond support for off-shore as the anti-renewables lobby in the Tory party continues its’ lobbying in utter disregard for UK-wide public opinion.

Government calls for evidence are never exciting and are often a low priority for over-stretched community organisations and social enterprises. But we can be sure that the anti-wind lobby will not ignore this: any organisation looking to see wind as one of the keystones for UK energy needs to make their voices heard.

And let’s recognise that this is about big and small wind. The idea that small scale wind run by community organisations is somehow different from commercial wind-farms may seem good sense but to the anti-wind lobby there is clearly no difference. If they see off large wind farms the rest will have no support, no infrastructure and no future.

So what do we say to DECC? To many involved the benefits are obvious. DECC state that they want new information on topics such as:

• Barriers to community engagement and how to address these;
• How wind farms could deliver wider environmental and social benefits to communities e.g. by providing grants for playgrounds;
• Maximising participation by local businesses in the economic supply chain for wind projects;
• Rewards for host communities, such as offsetting electricity bills.

These are fairly obvious and unimaginative – there’s a lot more to say, and perhaps we need to start with clarity on how communities engage with and benefit from wind. There is a spectrum of models to consider from community ownership through community investment to straightforward community benefit

Community ownership has been pioneered by the Baywind co-op (www.baywind.co.uk) whose Harlock Hill was the first community owned wind farm (and who have recently had to fight off DECC proposals that their Haverigg site was just right for a nuclear power station….). The benefits to the local community and to those who have invested have been well charted in terms of money and local investment but also in terms of community cohesion.

But much of this remains down to individual investment in local co-ops such as Baywind or Westmill near Swindon. New organisations such as Abundance are directly focusing on small investors. Is there scope for investment by communities and larger local organisations to invest in and help develop local wind – a way forward where the whole community could have significant equity?

A frequent concern is that people don’t have money or time to put into local renewables projects. As a result they feel disengaged and perhaps less likely to offer support.  This is where the key issues of whole-community benefit need to come in with the ‘Fintry model’ as a guide, where the profits from one turbine on a commercial wind farm go to the local community.

The village of Fintry in Stirlingshire was approached by a wind farm developer for support. After long negotiations they became the first village in the UK to enter a joint-venture agreement with a developer that secured a wind turbine within the larger wind farm for the community. From the income stream the turbine generates, the Fintry Development Trust (http://www.fintrydt.org.uk/)  has given free insulation to more than half of all households in the village and is now embarking on new ambitious projects to eventually make the village carbon-neutral.

It’s not just about the money – it’s how the money is used and that does mean moving beyond ‘grants for playgrounds’ (not that playgrounds are not important!) and ensuring that community organisations have control of how the money is spent and how that contributes to resilience in the longer term.  This is a critical long-term issue: a new proposal on the Fintry lines suggests that a community turbine could earn between £40,000 and £65,000 a year in the first three years, building up to as much as £300,000-£500,000 per annum in years 16 to 25.  And how will the community ensure that local people get the training, both to work on the wind farm, and also to run the projects that can spin off from it?

The ‘community benefits’ of existing projects are clear and well charted. If the DECC consultation is to have value it needs to understand these clearly but also to look beyond them to where the leading edge will be in a few years time. It needs to recognise that we are in the early stages of a transformation of how we produce, manage and use energy and that the full potential for both large and small wind is still uncharted.   DECC are talking of a ‘Community Energy Strategy’, seemingly for smaller ‘community energy’ projects.  But community energy management needs to go a lot further.

And DECC will only get that message if we engage – that’s not community energy projects,  and local green groups, but parish councils, development trusts, residents associations, faith groups and all the other elements of our community. And that will only happen if we open up this discussion widely and rapidly.

[And at which London Underground station was the picture at the top taken?]