Call to tie renewables consents to community packages

Onshore renewables and transmission developers should be forced to pay financial packages to local communities to help smooth away opposition to their projects, an influential Conservative-allied thinktank has urged.

Polling carried out by Onward for its new report, entitled ‘Power to the People’, shows that providing packages of community benefits are more popular among rural voters than offering discounts on their energy bills.

The polling shows that 56% of the countryside voters polled back an annual £250,000 community fund, which could be used to pay for insulation, heat pumps, electric car chargers, health services and local infrastructure.

A lower proportion (47%) backed a £75 reduction on their household energy bills, like that suggested by Octopus Energy.

Just over a third (37%) would oppose a local renewable project unless it came with community benefits attached.

And 77% of rural voters, who are planning to vote Conservative at the next election, would support local renewables as long as they came with community benefits.

The report recommends that the government should change planning policy to make community benefits packages obligatory for new onshore renewables and transmission network projects.

Developers should pay a default rate of £2 per MW hour into the community benefit funds, which would raise just under £6m over the 20 year lifetime of a medium-sized wind farm, the thinktank proposes.

The report suggests that local boards of elected representatives and other community leaders, such as head teachers or business owners, could decide what the money is invested in.

Onward says that while a “patchwork” of community benefits programmes has been developed voluntarily across England by energy developers and communities, this approach will not be sufficient to deliver the scale of infrastructure needed to increase energy security, reduce energy prices and reach the UK’s net zero targets.

It says the government should therefore establish a new ‘Green Energy Covenant’ to ensure local investment is tied directly to developments that are required in the national interest.

The report’s recommendations were backed by former Conservative levelling up secretary of state Sir Simon Clarke, who described the proposed Green Energy Covenant as “an important contribution to the growing campaign to lift the ban on onshore wind” that “provides a way to build an enduring political consensus to do so”.

Changing planning policy is the most efficient and simple route for making community benefit mandatory for new renewable energy and transmission network projects as opposed to other routes, such as Contracts for Difference, according to the report.

The Onward report has appeared alongside another study, published with support from the Climate Change Committee, which shows that planning system is not aligned with the UK’s strategy to meet net zero and is making things worse.

No adopted local plans are fully aligned with the scale of emission reduction required to reach net zero, a survey of councils carried out for the research shows, with 28% saying their blueprint is ‘not at all aligned’ with the 2050 target.

Just 8% said their local plan is ‘mostly aligned’ with the net zero goal and only 26% said it addressed embodied carbon.