How Can Communities Benefit from Wind Farms?
This guidance will be of interest to Community groups as well as Wind Developers and Local Authority officers with responsibility for community development.
What types of benefit are possible?
All types of benefits
This good practice 'Toolkit' provides information on the options for taking action to negotiate and potentially realise meaningful benefits for local communities. It describes what the options are, what communities can reasonably ask for and the pros and cons of different approaches and is designed to help wind energy developers, local authorities and local communities understand better:
- the range of ways in which ‘host communities’ can benefit from wind energy developments
- the possible justifications for ensuring greater local benefits
- the factors which may influence the nature and scale of benefits available to host communities
- the options for managing the delivery of benefits locally
- the role each of them can potentially play in securing local benefits
Community part ownership of wind farms
This report describes practical ways for communities to have part ownership of commercially developed windpower schemes. These are potential models of community ownership in wind farms which are acceptable to lending institutions, developers and the communities themselves. The intention is that such acceptability will facilitate increased community ownership and help the Government to reach its renewable energy target by 2010.
The report is not intended to be a guide for communities seeking to raise finance in order to set up a wind farm (other reports of this nature are available). It is intended first and foremost to establish ways to enable local ownership which fit with typical financing structures for commercial wind farm developments.
This report should be read in conjunction with the Delivering Community Benefits from Wind Energy Development - A Toolkit report.
How to negotiate these benefits?
These are detailed guidelines to the process of public engagement for wind energy developments. Effective engagement between a developer, the local authority, statutory consultees and the local community can help to ensure that proposals for developments in a locality are better. Supporting effective engagement is not about being in favour or against a particular proposed development. It is about trying to make sure that:
- decisions made in the planning system are as well-informed, evidence-based and timely as possible, and;
- any development that is permitted reflects an understanding of local interests and opportunities for positive local gain.