Renewable energy: Community ownership is way forward

While being exhorted to endorse all this, it would not be unreasonable for people to start asking: “What’s in for us, and for communities which otherwise are restricted to the privilege of looking at wind turbines churning out profits for multinational corporations?”.

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That thought motivated some old friends of mine in the Garnock Valley, including the former Labour MSP Allan Wilson, who had been the Holyrood Minister dealing with renewables, into action.

Seven years of hard work culminated yesterday in the announcement that funding is in place to build “the first 100 per cent community owned onshore wind turbine that will operate commercially, without the benefit of government price support mechanisms”.

That’s quite a landmark. Just as significant was Allan’s comment that “the turbine will secure more in community benefits for local people than all the commercially owned wind turbines visible in the area combined. We recommend the model to any community facing the same challenges”.

This should give food for thought across the UK. The Garnock Valley is the kind of area that would be waiting a long time if depending on the goodwill of government to bring in investment. Remarkably, a single wind turbine is capable of securing more money for the area, on a sustainable basis, than all the “Deals” and “Funds” put together. And the money will be used according to local priorities.

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A bit of background. Back in the day when I was MP for the area, we put a huge amount of effort into saving the architecturally important Radio City cinema building in Kilbirnie as a community facility.

It was later sold to become Radio City School for youngsters with additional needs. The proceeds created initial funding for the wind turbine project. A supportive local farmer provided the site.

After many twists and turns, the major source of funding is a Bristol-based company, Thrive Renewables, which specialises in community based investments.

The third sector Social Investment Scotland made up the difference after the Scottish National Investment Bank knocked the project back on the grounds it was too small. Really? Was it a worse bet than the Deposit Return Scheme?

Once they re-paid, every penny generated will be invested in the Garnock Valley; a good news story for an area that richly deserves one. It also begs the question of why the same principles have not been promoted and rolled out as the norm rather than the rare exception; not to replace the multinationals but to complement them because the renewables cake is surely big enough to go round.

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The Western Isles is a good example of an area that needs both approaches. There are several locally-driven windfarm developments that took advantage of the ROCs subsidy scheme to produce profits for their communities. But without big projects, now finally in the offing, there is no interconnector to the mainland so all power production is constrained. We need both.

As things stand, community benefit deals between private developers and host communities have been as good as could be negotiated in each case. They vary greatly. A standard model based on entitlement to a share in profitability would protect communities which are in no position, on their own account, to bargain with multinationals.

All of this will come into sharper focus as a result of the array of huge offshore wind farms now in the planning stages. Orkney has cottoned onto this early and is looking for legislation parallel to the Shetland Act in the 1970s which brought revenues direct to the communities that were hosting these developments. That is a difficult principle to argue against.

The scale of transition envisaged has to be better understood. In the past, the coal and steel economy dictated where power plants would be built under public ownership. Reciprocally, these areas benefited from large scale, long term employment. The same applied to nuclear which is foolishly being wound down (not least at Hunterston) with nothing to replace it.

Over the next couple of generations, that fading structure will be transformed beyond recognition. Power will come in volume from parts of the UK that were previously at the end of the line. That cannot be allowed to proceed on an ad hoc basis without any coherent effort to ensure it does not become another source of vast profit for the energy giants, with a few crumbs scattered around and few questions asked.

Is there any reason why an objective could not be set to allow every community to have a renewable energy project that is 100 per cent community owned, as will now happen in the Garnock Valley? And why not make it conditional that manufacturing takes place in the UK? That scale of thinking is required to make the revolution tangible.

Labour is accused of not making enough policy commitments but it strikes me the promise to create GB Energy, based in Scotland, with a £28 billion fund to back it up is pretty good. Better a few big promises that are deliverable than hundreds that will never see the light of day.

The challenge is to put flesh on the bones of what GB Energy will do to ensure real benefits for parts of the country that need them most. The wrong answer would be to continue sub-contracting that duty to the private energy sector to offer whatever they see fit. The best developers would welcome the rules being codified.

There are many other ways of defining “community benefit” and it is now a race against time to put them in place before the renewables horse has again bolted.

Brian Wilson is a former Energy Minister