Engie offers $1000 energy bill rebates to neighbours of wind and solar projects

Cost of living pressures are prompting French energy giant Engie to upgrade its community benefit offer, and pitch $1000 energy bill rebates to a much wider circle of ‘neighbours’ to its planned wind and solar projects.

The deal will be offered to locals who aren’t directly next door to a renewable energy project but who are likely to feel the consequences of it through higher traffic or visual sight-lines.  But beneficiaries do need to sign up with Engie as their energy retailer to get the discount. 

The life-of-project discount is also tied to the property so future residents can also receive the same benefit. 

“This initiative is not necessarily about more benefits. It’s about delivering them to where it’s needed the most,” says Engie’s head of portfolio growth and commercial, Anna Hedgcock.

“We’re a large gentailer so this is an easy way for us to deliver that direct benefit via a credit to their bill.”

She says the idea came about from the Hay, New South Wales (NSW) community, where Engie is planning a 1.9 gigawatt (GW) wind and solar project called The Plains. The local community wanted a direct, tangible benefit, rather than just the usual route of a community fund for local sports and facilities. 

Who will fall into the new, wider category of ‘neighbour’ will vary project to project, but at The Plains that means everyone within a distance of about 20kms, including the town of Hay, because of the “incredibly flat” landscape, Hedgecock says.

Engie plans to roll this benefit out to all future projects, including the contested Hills of Gold wind farm proposed in the New England Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) in northern NSW.

The developer has cut the number of turbines from 97 to 47, following more than 50 objections led by a group called Not in Nundle, and is still waiting on a decision from the NSW Planning Commission.

Other proposed developments include the Silverleaf and Yass solar projects in NSW, the Warhook solar project in Queensland and the Goorambat solar project in Victoria, as well as the Willatook wind project in Victoria.

Neighbourhood benefits beginning to spread

Offering energy bill discounts or cash to be spent locally has been tested and proved successful in Victoria, where developers were forced to upgrade their benefits offers in order to take part in the Victorian Renewable Energy Target (VRET) auctions.

The Victorian VRET program which kicked off its first reverse auction in 2017 raised standards around the country as one requirement for a successful bid was the offer of really good neighbourhood benefits, says RE Alliance advocacy manager Tony Goodfellow.

For example, Acciona offered a pre-loaded EFTPOS card to residents within 4kms of the Mortlake South Wind Farm which can be spent at local businesses – it’s into the fifth round of registrations, which close in June. 

The Golden Plains wind farm offers an electricity offset to households within 3km of the development as well as a one-off home energy audit. 

“I really like the Golden Plains and the Engie offers because they’re related to energy itself, and people can relate that to the project itself,” Goodfellow says.

Neighbourhood benefits were “an outrageous idea” just a decade ago but over the last seven years have become standard practice.

But communities still want legacy benefits for their communities as well.

Goodfellow is seeing developers of transmission projects look at investing in rundown distribution networks in their communities – a pathway he’d like to see more developers take – but these kinds of community works also require a company to have a deep understanding of what a place needs, and that means boots on the ground for a long time. 

The future of community benefits likely lies in co-ownership of projects and partnerships, he says, similar to the Squadron Energy offer in March for local communities to invest in two NSW wind farms. 

Governments move in to clean up the bottom end

Developers are moving quickly to bring the benefits they offer into line with community expectations, at the same time as governments begin to consider regulating how engagement is done. 

A major review of community engagements closed in December last year and found “material distrust” of developers of large renewable and transmission projects. 

It suggested a rating scheme for developers, an idea backed by energy minister Chris Bowen at the time, and sharing the benefits more equitably among communities.

Already in Victoria the government is proposing a compensation structure for landowners who host transmission lines of $200,000 per kilometre, indexed and paid over 25 years, in addition to payments made for the impact of infrastructure on their land.

Queensland is setting up a mandatory code of conduct for renewable energy developers that will set new standards for social licence and regional community priorities.

Hedgecock says while the Engie scheme isn’t a result of government pressure, those frameworks could create some challenges for developers in terms of government expectations around what developers should deliver in REZs and what developers can provide. 

“Developers have to be on the front foot regardless of what state or federal governments are doing. It is absolutely imperative if you are going to deliver a good project that is accepted by the community,” she says.