Renewable Energy Projects: Community Benefits Debate
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Ben Goldsborough
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Renewable Energy Projects: Community Benefits
Ben Goldsborough Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Ben Goldsborough (South Norfolk) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I have quite a bit of energy infrastructure going on in my constituency, be it the proposed Norwich to Tilbury line, the East Pye solar farm that has just been announced or the Ørsted battery energy storage site to the north of my constituency. To say that this debate is not hypothetical for my residents—it is very much a reality—would be underselling the matter. We have talked about community benefit and community wealth-building, but that is not something my constituents are happy to hear. They want to hear the word “compensation”. They do not want to hear the word “hosting”, because, at the end of the day, a pylon is not being hosted; it is being placed in their back garden.
It is important to remember in this debate that we live in a wasteland of regulatory framework for compensation. Individual businesses that take on such projects to grow their own enterprises—don’t get me wrong; they are private enterprises and there to make a profit—must work within a regulatory framework to make sure they are held to account and made to pay for the local people who have to face those developments in their area.
We have seen locally that the National Grid, for example, provides its own funding and grant-based system, but funding is not granted to individuals; it is only general. It takes into account such things as social, economic and environmental benefit, but those are judged by the National Grid’s own criteria. That is not something for which the National Grid is held to account, and it does not ensure that local people have a say over what is coming back to them.
The situation becomes even direr when we talk about solar farms. The industry body is responsible for setting out guidance on what should happen to all member bodies within it. Again, that creates an issue where those residents in areas considering having infrastructure in their back garden do not feel heard. They do not feel that they are being listened to in terms of what they want and where they need it. We want to drive towards net zero and we need to drive forward with the industrial upgrade to our national grid, but we end up in a situation where we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, putting people off our future development towards being a green superpower for the rest of the world to follow.