Election / Democratising energy, shifting power
Shetland News editor Hans J Marter was one of the participants of a day-long gathering in Glasgow discussing how Scotland’s energy transition is reshaping communities
HOW CAN a more nuanced debate on the energy transition be developed to move beyond polarisation and give communities affected by large energy projects a voice that is being heard?
How can the planning system be reformed and modernised in a way that means decisions on energy projects are more transparent and taken closer to home?
And how can communities be empowered to bring people together to strengthen local democracy?
These were some of the many topics discussed during a get together of local journalists, community activists and researchers organised by the Scottish Beacon and held at the University of Glasgow on Friday.
The Power Shift event was also the stage for the launch of a 36-page magazine by the same name, produced by local journalists from across Scotland to push the urgent topic of a fair energy transition up the election agenda.
Publishing the magazine is our attempt to help overcome the widespread feeling among local people of being powerless while “things are done to us” – be it Shetland, the Highlands or any other rural part of the country.
The team behind the publication hopes to instil better and more constructive conversations to the often-polarised discussions on the energy transition, on community benefit and community wealth growing.
To that end the magazine will be distributed at local hustings and be available to collect from several local outlets, including the Voar office in Bank Lane, and the BBC Radio Shetland offices. It can also be downloaded here.
Meanwhile Friday’s meeting heard accounts of how communities feel overwhelmed and unable to respond to the volume and the sheer size of energy projects proposed and developed, mainly in rural parts of the country, from Shetland in the north to Dumfriesshire in the south.
Described as a “gold rush” and an “economic free for all”, the opportunity for communities benefitting from the green energy boom is being lost due to the lack of a masterplan, outdated planning laws, and governments unwilling to listen to local voices, the meeting heard from several contributors.
Reporting from the Kyle of Sutherland, an attractive area for developers where more than 400 turbines have been projected or approved, Kyle Chronicle editor Silvia Muras said people felt exhausted and were asking “where is the limit?”.
“We are never able to see the full picture of what will be needed in terms of roads, pylons, substations (…) it’s being done for years and people in my community are understandably overwhelmed,” she said.
Paul Dobson from The Ferret spoke of an investigation he and colleagues had carried out to establish to what extent community benefit payments are being paid.
He said they found that more than 20 wind farms across Scotland had failed to establish the full £5,000 per megawatt community benefit payment as advised by the Scottish Government.
This is “creating a huge shortfall for communities from developers failing to live up to expectations place on them which are already not high enough,” he said.
Also attending the meeting was Josh Doble of Community Land Scotland, an organisation that represents 140 community landowners from the Western Isles to the central belt and increasingly more urban areas.
He spoke about how their work is focussed on issues such as community ownership, improving on community benefits payments, and a proposal to create a sovereign Scottish Community Wealth Fund, managed by communities to provide seed funding for community organisations.
While in countries such as Denmark there is a legal requirement for a 20 per cent shared ownership element in renewable energy projects, the figure for Scotland currently stands at a meagre 0.2 per cent.
“Our members do a huge amount of innovative revenue-generating projects, but the principal challenge is how to get long-term sustainable income stream,” he said.
If such a fund could be established and a mechanism for payments from onshore and offshore wind developments be agreed, then the hope was that by 2025 as much as £500 million could be paid into such a fund annually.
Daniel Gear, the managing director of local energy consultancy Voar, meanwhile described community energy as “the soul” of the energy transition, and quoted the Garth wind farm, in Yell, as a prime example.
“Community energy is the thing that’s absolutely critical to get right,” he said, adding that the success of the wind farm owned by the community in North Yell was “absolutely transformational”.
And he added that it was his experience that communities were willing to embrace the transition to renewables once they were guaranteed some ownership in projects and control of what is happening in their communities.
The meeting also watched sequences from two films, one of which will come to Shetland for screening later this summer.
Energy transition campaign group Platform is in the process of producing a “multifaceted kaleidoscope of different voices and themes” connected to the energy transition.
They have been to Shetland, Orkney, Lewis and Harris as well as Glasgow to collect those voices. Community screenings throughout the region are planned for later this year.
Meanwhile Dispatches from the Grid Frontline, produced by the Local Storytelling Exchange, examined what is happening along the east coast of Britain, where the so-called ‘great grid upgrade’ is taking place, and how communities responded.
The Power Shift initiative is a collaborative project of 10 local newsroom partners, including Shetland News, that launched last year with the help of funding from the Tenacious Journalism Awards.
It seeks to collectively tell better stories of what is going on in Scotland from a local perspective and have better informed and less polarised conversations on all the aspects of the energy transition.
To that end Shetland News has partnered with the local Climate Café to host an election hustings on climate in the Islesburgh Community Centre on Thursday 23 April at 6.30pm.
All stories published by Shetland News under the Power Shift heading can be found here.
Many thanks to Eve Livingston for the very thorough note taking.
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