Sweeteners
Alex Irwin, senior solicitor in the Renewable Energy Team at Davidson, Chalmers Stewart LLP, waxes lyrical about Community Benefit Schemes (Friends of The Scotsman, March 7, “Renewable Energy Projects can be transformational for communities across country”).
She writes: “Community Benefit Schemes have been popular with developers who want to provide additional advantages to the local community.” I read this as meaning that very few communities will willingly accept a wind farm on their doorstep unless there is a sweetener attached so offering a pittance to the community (in comparison to their anticipated profits) is a simple way for developers to generate some support.
Even then it is usually only communities who are lucky enough to be out of sight and hearing of the proposed wind farm, but close enough to receive the “benefit”, which are likely to support the development, not those who will have to live in its shadow.
There have been a few successful shared ownership schemes but who can forget the disaster that was Neilston Community Wind Farm, a joint venture between a community and a commercial developer which lasted just four years before being sold to a London investment company due to “difficulties managing the variations in income in light of the fixed interest loans they took out”. Once the loans were paid off, the Neilston community received only a fifth of what they were originally expecting.
The neighbouring village of Uplawmoor, where the wind farm was actually sited, despite huge opposition from that community, received no financial benefit and has now been left with industrial turbines degrading their landscape, noise and visual blight for a further 21 years.
Perhaps that’s why so-called Shared Community Ownership Schemes have not been as popular as hoped for by some policy makers. Some things are never forgotten.
Aileen Jackson, Uplawmoor, East Renfrewshire
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