Renewable Energy Projects: Community Benefits

Torcuil Crichton Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I commend the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) for raising this important matter. Attendance in the Chamber shows just how important this element of GB Energy and the transformation we are going through will be to many constituencies.

I rushed here—via lunch, of course—from the Committee considering the Bill that will establish GB Energy. The Great British Energy Act will be the first Act to pass into law in this Parliament—Labour delivering change within weeks of coming into office. That Act and this transformation will change not only the way we produce power and the impact we have on a burning planet, but the way we live our lives. It could have a transformative effect for communities such as mine.

I commend the Minister for the way he has seized the agenda on GB Energy and seen the potential that the transition could have for places such as Na h-Eileanan an Iar, and the Isle of Eigg in the constituency of the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, which the Minister visited recently. As we move to renewables, we should not forget that we are transitioning away from carbon, and we have to balance the transition with maintaining jobs in the North sea, which are a vital to many economies, communities and families in Na h-Eileanan an Iar.

The focus of the debate, community benefit, is one element of that transition. I prefer to describe and define it as “community share”. When people hear “benefit”, they think they are getting crumbs; when they have a share, they own it and control it. As it happens, my community has become the epicentre for community-owned wind farms in the UK. Community-owned turbines stretch from Barra in the south, to Galson in the north of Lewis. Those community-owned assets bring in millions of pounds each year to the communities that own them. Something like 23.5 MW is produced each year, which is a modest amount, but one that brings £3 million a year to small rural communities. Scotland’s community-owned wind farms provide on average 34 times more benefit payments to local communities than the equivalent privately-owned wind farms. If we do the maths, we can see the potential that community-owned energy schemes have to transform the whole of the UK. What is not to like about them?

Community-owned schemes, which in my community support everything from warm home grants to native tree planting, are a template for what could happen in constituencies across the whole of the UK. For renewal and expansion, these schemes need funding, yes, but primarily access to the grid. For us in the Western Isles, that means getting reserved space, by regulation or legislation, on a planned interconnector—a 1.8 GW subsea cable that will connect us to the mainland and enable turbines swinging in the Atlantic to turn on lightbulbs in Birmingham, the City and many other places.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Order. The time limit for speeches will be two and a half minutes, but since the hon. Member did not know that when he began his speech, I cannot hold him to it. However, if he concludes soon, that will be ideal, because there are 15 people yet to speak.

[Torcuil Crichton]

Yes, I will wind up quickly.

There has been an apparent breakthrough, in that three community-owned estates have come together with a plan for a 43 MW wind farm and have been given a connection on the grid. That grid connection is crucial, but so is the massive funding gap that these communities face between getting from concept, through environmental regulation and planning, to connection. That is where GB Energy has a role. I have advocated for a community energy unit within GB Energy to help communities tackle the minefield of financial and regulatory complexities. The Minister cannot snap his fingers and bring GB Energy or a community energy unit into being, but if officials from GB Energy were to shadow and assist those three estates in their efforts over the next two years, we would learn an enormous amount about community energy and create a template that other communities across the UK could follow.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) on securing this a vital debate.

“Wha but lo’e the bonnie hills”,

the very first line of the song “Bonnie Galloway”—I will spare you by not singing it, Dr Huq—extols the virtues of the rolling uplands of the south-west of Scotland. Yet the tranquillity of the moors, farms and forests has been disturbed these last few years by the relentless march of wind turbines. Now Dumfries and Galloway is festooned with them and we have many more on the way. We are in the foothills of a renewables revolution.

Arguments for or against wind farms are not for today. I feel that battle has been lost, but we must fight a rearguard action against ever-bigger turbines. Giants of over 650 feet from base to rotor tip are the fashion, and they are moving ever closer to our towns and villages. I feel that we will see Governments happily trample local opposition to wind farms and turn a deaf ear to forcing power cables underground.

Whether we welcome wind farms or have them foisted upon us, we must wrest from them what community benefit we can. Communities already see little enough of the supply chain benefits. It is to be hoped that the previous UK Government’s efforts to create freeports in Scotland might see more of the manufacturing based here in Britain. I have hopes, too, that Labour will make good on a Northern Ireland enhanced investment zone, as mapped out by the previous Conservative Government, that included the western end of my constituency. That would be a game changer: imagine the jobs created if we could build those giant turbines in Stranraer and ship them out via the deep-water port of Cairnryan.

On renewables, we in rural Scotland have had much of the pain and little of the gain.

[Torcuil Crichton]

Will the hon. Gentleman agree that the difference between Dumfries and Galloway and many parts of the highlands and islands that have benefited from community or commercially-owned wind farms is community ownership of land and that, were that pattern to be repeated in his part of the world, communities would benefit not only from community land ownership, but from owning the turbines that spin?

[John Cooper]

I resist the invitation to back a land grab, but the hon. Gentleman makes a valid point.

We have a chance now to bake in greater benefits for our communities, and they should be seen, not as bribery to buy off opposition, but as the power giants entering partnership with communities. I still say that our communities need a far greater say over wind farm consents, but the urban-obsessed SNP in Edinburgh and Labour here in this place will not shift.

There is an undeniable whirlwind of change on wind power. We have the chance to reap a positive harvest from that whirlwind for the people living in the shadow of giant turbines and pylons. Let us seize that chance.