Abstract:
Prior to planning consent, risk exposure for renewable energy projects is highly opaque, particularly for small place-based social enterprises (‘communities’). This has constrained the ability of community organisations to plug into the renewable energy sector. This study investigates the constraining and enabling factors determining why certain community projects in the UK successfully attain early stages of project development while others do not. Due to the nature of community enterprise engagement in renewable energy, this requires an understanding of the factors affecting political support for a project from local to council levels, including all factors that are likely to affect planning application outcomes. A number of technical, social, regulatory, financial and organisational capacity risks are identified and operationalised for analysis. A binary discrete choice model is applied to a cross-sectional dataset on Scottish, English, Welsh and Northern Irish community projects to explain successful early stage project outcomes. Results suggest that distance to densely populated areas and access to land are significantly correlated to early stage project outcome, broadly providing evidence that local resources and conditions have an effect on the early stage outcome of community-led renewable energy projects.