Generating conditions of strong social support for wind power: insights from community-owned wind energy projects

ABSTRACT

In community-owned windfarms, community members are involved in initiating, developing, owning and benefiting from the windfarm. As such, these projects facilitate multiple opportunities for local people to participate in development processes and outcomes. However, like any form of development, community-owned windfarms vary significantly from project to project. Specifically, projects employ different business models – including different economic arrangements, governance structures and community engagement practices – which have significant implications for the degree of community participation enabled and the types of social outcomes experienced. Through qualitative analysis of Australia's two (and only) operating community-owned windfarms, this article presents unique insights into the relationships between windfarm business models and social outcomes. The article reveals the importance of participation to realising a range of positive social outcomes, including experiences of empowerment and active support for wind energy. The findings indicate that community participation in windfarm processes and outcomes, over time and in ways that are sustained and multifaceted, contributes to generating conditions of strong social support. The insights are applicable to improving social outcomes across all models of wind development.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-owned renewable energy
• wind energy
• participation
• social attitudes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the participants in this research for providing your insights and making it possible. Financial support was received from Australian Government's Australian Postgraduate Award program, the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales and Herbert Smith Freehills.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Business models’ is used broadly to encapsulate the community engagement practices, economic arrangements and governance structures used to establish a business or project. This goes beyond a narrow focus on legal structure and financial flows commonly associated with understandings of business models.

2 ‘Community’ is variously defined, but within CORE it generally refers to communities of locality and/or of interest, and actors that are independent of state or corporate interests (Hicks and Ison 2018).

3 This article draws on a larger research project conducted for the award of a doctorate of philosophy (Hicks 2018). Ethics approval was received through the University of New South Wales Human Research Ethics Committee, number HC15161.

4 Interview participants are identified by a code (e.g. HW# for Hepburn Wind; DCW# for Denmark Windfarm) that references the project they are associated with, while protecting confidentiality.

5 The discrepancy in numbers of participants from Hepburn Wind (20) compared with Denmark Windfarm (eight) is a reflection of the different levels of local participation (in terms of numbers of people and depths of engagement) between the two projects and the bearing this had on the ease of sourcing research participants. In addition, the researcher was able to return more frequently to Hepburn (due to geographic proximity) and so finding appropriate times to coordinate interviews and focus groups was easier.

6 B-corps are enterprises that take up a voluntary external certification and reporting process to ‘hold themselves to a higher levels of accountability’ across governance and environmental and social impact (B Lab 2017).

7 The participant's name has been changed for confidentiality purposes.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support was received from Australian Government's Australian Postgraduate Award program, the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales and Herbert Smith Freehills.