Should we put Scotland's energy into local hands?
Small community-owned energy projects inject more money into local areas than large-scale corporation initiatives, say experts
This feature first appeared in The Sunday Post on 1 September 2024.
A Western Isles native who now lives on Skye, Faye MacLeod has unique insight into Scotland’s renewable energy potential.
MacLeod is a local accountant who works primarily with small businesses across the Highlands and Islands. Over the last 20 years or so, she has supported Western Isles communities as they moved to embrace renewable energy and set up their own community-led energy companies.
Through sheer grit and decades of thankless hard work, communities dotted around the Western Isles have built a total of nine wind turbines across the islands. Now that those turbines are up and running and connected to the National Grid, they produce a collective profit of £2.2 million, all of which is poured back into their communities.
The picture on Skye, however, is very different, says MacLeod. “It’s quite a stark contrast between what is going on here in Skye and what happened on the Western Isles,” she explained. “Those were community-developed and community-owned, and on Skye, we’re talking about potentially nine different entirely commercial developments.”
In Scotland, only 1% of onshore wind farms are community, co-operative or municipal-owned. The majority sit with big businesses and corporations who, with wind farms much bigger in size than typical community-owned farms, make eyewateringly large profits but are under no obligation to put any of it back into the communities hosting their infrastructure.
Ben Aketil Wind Energy Ltd installed one of the first wind farms on Skye. Between 2008 and 2022, the farm made profits of over £55.5 million, but only £658,000 was reinvested back into the community. MacLeod argues this falls far short of what was promised at the consultation stage.
She said: “They had promised £3,000 per megawatt of installed capacity, and if they had actually paid what they promised, then it would have been about £1.2 million for the community – instead, it’s been almost half of that. Community benefit is not a contractual or legal obligation, it is simply a gift, and these promises are made in advance of planning applications. There’s nothing in writing to say they need to make these payments. We’re getting far less than we should be.”
Skye produces enough renewable energy to power around 55,000 households, while the island itself is estimated to have around only 5,000 homes. Yet despite hosting infrastructure that harnesses enough wind to power their own homes many times over, Skye residents pay some of the highest energy prices in the country. This, coupled with 36% of Highland and Island residents struggling with fuel poverty, makes the poor returns their communities receive from renewable energy especially galling.
Similar stories have come from other commercial wind farms across Scotland. Whitelee Wind Farm, 20 minutes from Glasgow, is the UK’s largest onshore wind farm. It has 215 turbines and can power 350,000 homes. In its first 10 years of operation, the company donated £9 million to local projects. While it might seem like a lot, smaller community-owned wind farms have brought in the same amount of revenue while having a much smaller impact on the local community.
Calum MacDonald was a Labour MP for the Western Isles between 1987 and 2005. He was one of the main driving forces behind setting up Point And Sandwick Trust, an Isle of Lewis-based charitable organisation that built the biggest community-owned wind farm in Scotland.
MacDonald said: “Whitelee is 60 times bigger than Point And Sandwick, but they provide the same amount of money to their local community as we do to ours at around £900,000 a year. Having a community-owned wind farm can literally be 60 times more profitable than having corporate turbines in your area. If Whitelee was community-owned, it would be worth £60 million a year for local communities.”
Corporations have the revenue to build massive wind farms like Whitelee, but the bigger the project, the bigger the levels of disruption for locals, especially for rural island communities. MacLeod argues that Skye’s infrastructure will struggle with three to five years of large-scale wind farm construction on the island and that huge amounts of peatland will be disturbed by turbine installations, releasing copious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. A smaller, community-owned wind farm would cause significantly less disruption to the island while raking in the same level of profit for the community.
While it might seem like a no-brainer for rural communities to cash in and put up turbines, it is an incredibly difficult task in practice. Even the development of corporate-owned wind farms can take more than 10 years, and they have teams of lawyers and staff to help the process go as smoothly as possible. Setting up an energy project in a sparsely inhabited rural area is complex and extremely difficult for volunteers to pull off on their own. When it comes time to compete for grants and funding with more central rivals that have greater resources, rural communities often lose out.
Dr Keith Baker at the Department of Civil Engineering and Environmental Management at Glasgow Caledonian University said: “People in rural communities have less ability to have a say in the decision-making process. If you live in rural Highlands, you might have to take an overnight trip to speak to your local councillor face to face. It’s all these little things that add up meaning rural communities get disadvantaged to the point of being ignored.”
Yet positive noises from the new Labour government are giving community organisations hope. Labour’s GB Energy plan states that: “[We will partner with] local authorities and co-operatives to develop small-scale and medium-scale community energy projects.” It also says that “profits will flow directly into local communities… not to the shareholders of foreign companies”.
Josh Doble, policy manager at Community Land Scotland, is tentatively excited about the potential of new community-led energy policies. He said: “We’re encouraged by the language that is being used. It’s a huge opportunity and a big market, and local communities that take hold of that opportunity can deliver multiple local, economic and social developments. It can build a huge amount of expertise and skill in rural areas.”
MacDonald is part of Community Energy Scotland, which has written an open letter to UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to ensure communities remain at the heart of renewable power policy. MacDonald said: “There’s a financial framework for new wind farms, and it’s full of bureaucracy to even qualify. What we are proposing is that 10-20% of that is ring-fenced for communities to access, and if it’s not taken up, it can be released back to the multinationals.”
MacDonald has seen first-hand how transformative community-owned energy projects can be. He said: “The key thing is that it’s worth it. You’re setting up a legacy project that can last 25 years, and potentially another 25 years, and another after that. Wind power is never going out of fashion, people can develop an incredible legacy where money is coming into your community every year.
“The Point And Sandwick Trust have provided funding for local school kits, trips, for the local hospice, to local arts and culture projects, and we are restoring a Victorian windmill. We’re planting native woodland all over the Western Isles, and we have a fuel poverty programme. It’s a very wide range, and it’s up to the community to decide how the money is spent.”
A spokesperson for ScottishPower Renewables, which owns Whitelee, said: “We need to generate as much green energy as possible, as quickly as possible, if the UK is to meet its target of decarbonising the power sector by 2030 and to ensure energy security. It will take all sorts of projects – large and small – to achieve this. Scottish Power Renewables is able to do this efficiently, thanks to the size and scale of our portfolio.
“ScottishPower Renewables has shared £65 million in community benefit funds to date.”