Britain’s biggest community wind farm, owned by the Point and Sandwick Trust on the Isle of Lewis, has called on the Scottish and UK governments to enable a radical ramping-up of community owned energy to spread the economic benefits of the green energy transformation around Scotland’s communities.
This follows the release of a new paper by a consortium of five Scottish community development groups (Community Energy Scotland, Community Land Scotland, the Development Trusts Association Scotland, Scottish Communities Finance and Scottish Community Alliance) calling for action on 7 key points including:
- A tenfold increase in the amount of community energy in Scotland to 1 Gigawatt (1,000 MW) by 2030
- Using the future ‘repowering’ of existing wind farms to boost community ownership in the energy sector
- Making it mandatory on all private developers to report on the community benefit payments from their renewable energy projects
- Creating a Community Wealth Fund in Scotland to ensure a lasting legacy from the green energy revolution.
Calum Macdonald, Development Director for Point and Sandwick Trust and a Director of Community Energy Scotland commented:
“It is now widely recognised that Scotland has had a poor deal out of the past decade or more of green energy expansion, with just a small trickle-down of benefits and jobs coming to communities and local economies while most of the green energy profit is going overseas.”
“Ramping up community-owned energy is the way to change that and countries like Denmark show that that is possible if it is supported with the right kind of government policies. Policy changes like giving communities fair access to grid connection and putting community energy ahead of private corporations when leasing government land for development would be cost the taxpayer nothing but would have a transformative effect. If developed at scale, it would mean hundreds of millions of energy profits coming back into Scotland’s economy.
“With elections coming up soon in both Scotland and the UK, this is the right time to demand a radical change of direction on green energy from all the parties competing for the support of Scotland’s voters.”
In 2021, Point and Sandwick Trust commissioned an independent report that showed that Scotland’s community-owned wind farms have provided, on average, 34 times more benefit payments to local communities than privately owned wind farms. The report, produced by Aquatera Ltd compared nine community owned and four private wind farms in Scotland and found that returns from the community owned wind farms average £170,000 per installed MW per annum, far exceeding the community benefit payment industry standard of £5,000 per installed MW per annum.
Pictured top: Beinn Ghrideag, Point and Sandwick Trust community owned wind farm, Isle of Lewis.
Pictured above: Calum Macdonald, Director Point and Sandwick Trust.
All photos ©SandiePhoto
Click to read in Gaelic.