Frameworks for Community Self Selection of Large-Scale Energy Infrastructure
The CDRC’s Empowering Community Energy project seeks to prevent conflict between communities and renewable energy companies before they arise by exploring a system of community self-selection and grassroots consensus building for large scale wind and solar farm investment.
It reverses the onus from industry and government selecting development sites, and then engaging communities in attempts to influence them towards compliance, towards a ‘demand driven’ system based on the pre-identified desire of a community to host large scale renewable energy investment and, in doing so, reduce the risk of project failure.
Australia stands at the beginning of an extraordinary transformation in the energy systems that power our country.
Over the next 9 years, renewable energy will replace over half of all electricity generation, with regional and rural area at the forefront of that transformation.
Regional and rural communities will be at the heart of enabling and bearing the impacts of a once in a generation expansion of large-scale energy infrastructure.
However, in past decades, the expansion of energy infrastructure has created tensions.
Government and Industry have often operated in ways in which large-scale project sites have been identified through technical surveys, and then developed with reference to planning and regulatory schemes.
Communities who must host and live with those projects have then been engaged through processes of consultation at late stages of project planning in ways which have generated opposition and generated widespread community concern.
In response to these problems, bodies such as the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner, the Clean Energy Council, and state bodies such as the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning have developed guidelines for the engagement of communities that set out leading practice for industry in their engagement with community.
Leading practice guidelines have begun to identify that the best approaches to building partnerships with communities is not to ‘consult’ with them, but to empower those communities.
This involves placing decision making in the hands of the community, enabling the community to lead the development of renewable energy projects, and creating partnerships where industry and government then implement what the community decides (DEWLP, 2021).
Despite progress, too often, industry and government engagement frameworks remain structured by an approach where large-scale energy development sites are identified first, and communities are then ‘engaged’ or ‘consulted’ in an attempt to ‘gain’ a social license to operate, mirroring practices described as “by any measure … totally unsatisfactory” (Mercer, 2003) and “notably lacking” (Hindmarsh and Matthews, 2008) in earlier reviews by independent researchers.
The challenge then, is to create mechanisms for communities to lead decision-making processes on the selection of large-scale energy infrastructure and connect those mechanisms to systems which allow government and industry to effectively implement those decisions.
This project by the Community Dispute Resolution Centre explores how bottom up, community driven, consensus building approaches can be employed in selecting sites for renewable energy infrastructure projects and enable rapid uptake and implementation of energy infrastructure as part of a strategy to lower greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation.
Want to know more?
Book a time to speak with our research team at: admin@cdrcentre.com.au
Or
Contact the project director, Dr Aran Martin, directly at aran.martin@cdrcentre.com.au