Money alone can’t buy social licence for wind and solar projects

Renewable energy projects are coming with bigger cash kitties for communities, but developers say money can’t buy everything – and certainly not if they don’t first listen to what the people are asking for. 

The incentives developers offer as the quid pro quo for putting a wind or solar farm or battery in a rural area are becoming more sophisticated and more targeted.

Power bill rebates answer the long-running question of whether a renewable project will lower energy bills for locals, and big, co-mingled multi-project funds begin to emerge as ways to deliver more impact than one solar or wind farm can do alone.

But the line between who counts as a neighbour, who is community, and who gets nothing at all is still a challenge. It’s likely to become increasingly fraught as the financial benefits increase.

What is clear is that communities are much more savvy about what they are requesting from renewables developers now – New South Wales (NSW) has gone so far as to codify these to set expectations – and developers are needing to come up with more sophisticated ways of sharing the wealth.

These insights are emerging from the 50-odd submissions made under the Clean Energy Council’s (CEC) first year of mandatory annual reporting for companies signed up to its best practice charter. 

“I think the industry has come a long way in the last five years. We haven’t really had data to show that before but that’s a big part of what this best practice charter reporting is all about,” CEC policy director Nick Aberle told Renew Economy.

“We’re seeing more sophisticated schemes that are really starting to engage deeply with communities, on the types of issues that are priorities to the community, and it’s becoming a collaborative approach.”

Aberle says there is a lot of coverage of happening in the energy transition that people don’t like, the CEC reports show the other side as well.

What best practice looks like

What best practice looks like is a combination of targeting benefits to what a community wants, and being in a position to listen to queries, complaints and concerns when they arise. 

Practically, that involves being on site and providing multiple forums to ask questions over time, be it town hall sessions, one-on-one meetings, or having a local office in an area, says RES Group head of sustainability communications and engagement Tanya Jackson.

“We have an obligation to bring the community along on the journey. Often there is that fear of change and a lack of understanding about what a big infrastructure project is going to mean,” she told Renew Economy.

“There needs to be an empathy for the rate of change, because we’re running out of time from a transition perspective.”

And what a community wants isn’t necessarily cash in hand. Jackson says offering jobs, training, and the opportunity to consult is proving to be a winning combination. 

One idea the company has brought from its homeland in the UK are community consultative committees, which are being trialled at the central Queensland Moa Creek and the NSW Tarong West wind projects. 

“We certainly don’t just have people who are supportive of the project. More often than not there are people who have concerns about the project who participate and that is why it’s good to have robust debate about how the project is developing,” she says.

Crossing the line

But there are lines that need to be drawn between what a developer can do, and what it shouldn’t. 

There is a commercial imperative to making an effort to listen and respond, but what communities demand is not always possible, says Doug Landfear, the Australian project director for Danish wind developer Vestas.

One example is negotiating the position of wind turbines before conversations with the owner of the land have finished.

“That’s a bilateral discussion between a developer and a land owner and I don’t think it’s possible to ask the community where you should put infrastructure in advance of that discussion with the private landowner,” he told Renew Economy.

He says the line between who counts as a neighbour and who falls into the broader ‘community’ class is changing. 

“Developers are looking to push those boundaries out a little more,” he says.

“There are so many different ways of slicing and dicing community and neighbour payments and benefits, whether direct bilateral neighbour agreements or neighbour funds, it will be different for every project.

“Drawing the line of where do neighbours stop and community begins, I don’t think anyone has answered that question.”

What consultation and a benefit budget buys

The Delburn wind farm is one example of what it takes to get a renewable energy project through in the face of staunch community opposition. 

The project developer OSMI Australia fended off a planning then a court challenge in 2022 and 2023, and received final planning approval this year. 

It has tried to win the community over via a local office in the town of North Mirboo and sharing technical reports, bringing in a consultative committee, and taking on feedback that led to turbine numbers dropping from 53 to 33 and reducing the noise limits from the farm.

“Having local based employees in a local office from public launch of the project allows us to be embedded in the community to engage when it suits locals, rather than dropping in to meet when is convenient to us,” says OSMI Australia executive director of development Peter Marriott.

“In response to the feedback we received, we adopted low amenity noise limits, well below the allowable limit in Victoria, for our design criteria. We also provide a service where we visit the wind farm’s near neighbours to complete a visualisation with augmented reality technology, allowing neighbours to understand the visual impact of the project from their homes.”

Delburn has a neighbour profit sharing option of $500,000 a year for the 103 households within 2kms of a turbine, a co-investment option once the project is live, and a community grants scheme worth $150,000 a year, or $750 per installed megawatt.