Let people make wind turbines
Helena Solman about fully involving people from imagining to maintenance
Below you will find excerpts from my interview with Helena Solman, PhD candidate at Wageningen University, which you can listen to here (or look for the Social Life of Energy on your favourite podcast app).
You will read (or hear) about the inherent deficiences of compensation mechanisms, “co-production” versus “invited citizen consultation”, involving wind turbine manufacturers, the value of thinking in terms of ‘publics’ instead of communities, the paradox of legitimacy and more!
Helena
We know how difficult that is to get everyone involved and have an equal opportunity to express their concerns. And I think this is really the key challenge of the energy transition that we have. Yeah, there is increasingly a resistance. There's a whole literature about nimbyism, right? So all the reasons why people supposedly really against wind energy or other renewables in their location, while in theory they are positive or at least accepting of wind energy on a larger scale. So I was really interested in public engagement. Is there more to it than this? So I tried to look at public engagement from a slightly different perspective. And that's the perspective of co-production. So looking beyond people being invited in to participate in wind energy and instead to look at the whole lifecycle of wind turbines. So I started with the phase in which wind turbines are being designed up until they're commissioned. And I saw that there is a huge range of decisions that have been taken, and a huge number of moments in which they can people could participate.
Marten
In the newsletter, I talk about this article by Jorgensen and colleagues about different distributive justice mechanisms that they've come up with in Denmark, and how it doesn't really seem to work. There is the compensation mechanism. And there is the ability to invest in the wind development or some other way of sharing the benefits. I was wondering, having done this literature review about participation, what do you notice in what’s going wrong in these cases?
Helena
Right. So I think compensation mechanisms are very interesting. At first sight, they might seem be promising, to compensate people for the loss of their environment. But I think the problem starts with the whole idea of compensation, because once you admit that you have to compensate someone for it, it will never be, I think it will never be good enough. Because first of all, it already means that you admitted that there is something intrinsically wrong about projects from the very beginning, and that people really deserve compensation, which can be true, but it will just be probably a one-time financial incentive for people to say yes to a project instead of allowing real involvement in decision-making. So that's the first reason and the second is that when you are designing compensation schemes, you always have to draw a line between who gets compensated, how much and based on what criteria, and this is, I think, where all the problems in justice or injustice of wind energy starts, because you will have situations when one neighbour gets compensated, and another not. And it's, yeah, it's a source of conflicts. It's a source of many problems with wind energy that you have to decide what claims are legitimate. What deserves compensation award, what not.
The compensation schemes are even called bribes by some authors, right? And I think there is there is something to it, because giving monetary value or at least one-time compensation to something that is perceived as a negative impact, in my opinion, it can hardly go well, because you basically try to translate a very complicated way in which people feel about, for example, the natural environment, about housing, market values, and all these other things into a financial compensation. So that does not help.
Marten
Let's actually take that point and move to the article by Catherine Gross, which is a little bit older from 2007, I believe. What she actually advised was that you pay attention, not to these kind of rules of compensation, but that you find ways to include people in the decision making process. So she comes up with these fairly, I would say, straightforward guidelines about how to do this. So it seems like it's it shouldn't be so difficult to get this right. But then it seems like it is.
Helena
Yeah, I think that's right. The principles that she outlines, they are really, as you say, important, and will intuitively correct, right? But there are so many different kinds of wind energy developments, right, we have wind energy developments offshore, we have huge wind forms, or onshore. But we have also small, smaller projects. And I think the way in which you are engaging people, and what kind of decisions and justice processes are there is really depending on that. So I think it's easier to talk about getting these kind of processes, right, in case of one wind turbine for a smaller village, as opposed to a nationally important wind farm that will have an entirely different kind of scale and, you know, stakeholders involved and owners of the parks, so I think automatically, the, the level of decision making power that local communities have is this kind of project decreases.
And so I think what we are seeing is that it's in practice so difficult, because the way in which with energy sector is moving these days is, you know, upscaling it's we need more and more wind energy infrastructure, the scale is increasingly bigger. So it's really difficult to have ownership for a local community that that is very meaningful for them. So in practice these projects have become more and more professionalized and really owned by large, multinational companies, there is no place for local communities from the very beginning to be involved. And so, in Denmark these compensation schemes are really a symptom of lack of space for community ownership and community scale, energy infrastructure. Now, I don't say that's, that's bad, necessarily, but it’s showing us that the way in which we think about participation is just not catching up with these developments.
Marten
Is there any way to salvage the situation?
Helena
One of the things that is often forgotten is the wind turbine technology itself. In participation processes, we often discuss acceptable locations, and whether projects with finished designs get support from local communities or not. And I think that the story can be much more nuanced in terms of how and when projects are acceptable. So given, for example, concerns about birds and bird strikes, is it that people should say only yes or no to wind turbines, but they could say conditionally ‘Yes, if you improve this or that’.
So we can really open up the discussion about how what kind of wind turbines, how many, how tall are acceptable. And I think that there is a huge potential in making better use of digital technologies in both the design phase of wind turbines, so to have kind of better, better idea about how new wind energy developments will look, how much noise they will be producing, for example, how they will look in the landscapes who will have the negative impact of for example, shadow flicker or noise. And so to kind of make that much more tangible to people. And also to try to experiment with the design, so to see, what is better. Is it one smaller wind turbine? For example, a few smaller wind turbines, a one bigger, right, a better option options.
For example, there's this park, this this case is actually not part of my review, but I came across it some time ago, when, when reading about wind energy in Norway. You often think that people want to have wind energy as invisible as possible is because they feel that turbines are ugly, or they should be out of sight. But I think what they this case shows is that, actually, wind turbines were made more visible, and they were made more visible for birds. Because it was an important concern to community. So they embrace wind energy in their local landscape. And because of the concerns for birds, they decided to paint one of the blades black. And yeah, it really helped. There was a study that showed that the decrease in birth strikes was by 70%. So it was a huge improvement. And it just showed [what’s possible] when you take people's concerns as an important input into what wind farms should look like.
Marten
This is also an example of the community having something to say about what the wind turbines themselves look like. You call this co production. Can you say a little bit about what that is and how this is different from let's say, stakeholder consultation or invited consultation.
Helena
To me, co-production is more than participation because it really opens up how technologies and landscapes evolve over time and their response to different concerns of people. So you can start already at the very moment in which wind turbines are being designed and think about how wind turbines should be innovated, should we be going into increasingly more powerful wind turbines increasingly higher, or should we innovate for small-scale wind turbines that the farmers will have on the land? It's just really opening up the design of wind turbines in an entirely different way than: do you accept wind energy or not. And then co-production of landscapes is also thinking about energy landscapes in a way that is more than a location that is acceptable. It's not: choose location A, B, C. And then, once you have a wind turbine or farm, you can ask yourself, how does that change land use? Do people use that area in a different way? Is there more tourism and more recreation or less? Is there damage to environment? So it's, it's not only the decisions about which location is acceptable, but all the decisions about how the wind park will change and how it should be managed. How it will be used, by whom?
Marten
And maybe as a final question to, to round this off, one of the key problems in experiences with stakeholder participation or planning consultation is the idea of community: for example in who gets to claim the benefits. How does community figure in the perspective of co-production? Or how does production methodology relate to this question of who is included in the process?
Helena
If you ask think in terms of co-production about who has the decision making power, I prefer to speak about publics, instead of communities. It’s a question of what kind of concerns really play out? And who are the actors really voicing these concerns and how they kind of get involved in in the process. Rather than, you know, pre-determining who these local communities are and saying, okay, the community is the people who can see the turbines, or the people who live on this and this street. [It’s very difficult to get that right.] Also, wind farms are becoming increasingly more expensive or large scale, the numbers of investors is growing and so it often goes beyond that the local area. So you will have people investing maybe even from across whole country. Do they get a say, or not?
Marten
So if I try to summarize a little bit. This newsletter was about legitimacy. It's about justice. And what I’m hearing you say, legitimacy is paradoxical. It's something that you can achieve if you stop asking for acceptance, if you stop asking people to say yes or no, but instead, involve them in a much more complex range of decisions, then legitimacy is something that can come out of that process. Acceptance is something that comes out of that process as a sort of a side effect, almost, of doing this kind of co-production approach. And then, what you're saying is that if you stop looking at community, but instead look at publics, that means that anyone who feels they are concerned with the project is allowed in some way to participate in its decision making process. That means that you have to juggle probably a lot of different kind of interests and perspectives, but it is productive. We hope?
Helena
Yeah, there are maybe a few cases in which there can be a really clear cut in who the local community is, but wind energy is increasingly big scale. So there you don’t only have local communities, but you have a lot of different interest groups who want to have a say and you will need to balance them.
And I think one way to go about it is to also have two different processes in place in which people can have a say about the design of these wind farms and even in the innovation of wind turbines. So I think that means starting really early at the stage of design and innovation and having more transdisciplinary research, to have more cooperation with wind turbine manufacturers, thinking about: what are the sustainable solutions for wind farms, how you will be commissioning them? What are the materials? And so asking, rrally, a lot of difficult questions and challenging questions about you know, how wind farms can be part of our more sustainable energy infrastructure, instead of assuming that that's the green and sustainable solution that people should accept.