Is your project very small-scale, which reduces the number of acceptability issues and the engagement processes?
Although there have been some changes to the Planning Laws regarding microgeneration renewable installations “to make it easier for individuals to help combat the threat of climate change by producing their own energy from renewable sources” (e.g. the changes to ‘permitted development’), these mostly apply to solar and wind technologies and do not apply to even the smallest hydropower scheme. Therefore any project will involve some degree of public engagement, even though it may be the bare minimum of notices and invitations to respond that apply to all planning permission applications.

Why engage the public?

What are the reasons for engaging with the public? The simplest answers are to pre-empt opposition, build support, and establish a group that can actively develop the scheme. The other reason is that even if renewable energy is increasingly seen as an ‘obviously’ good thing, our political system insists that people who may be affected by development have the democratic right to be engaged about it. The following points give further examples of why public engagement should always be considered in developing any project.

How developers of small hydro projects communicate with, listen to and engage with the wider public can be crucial to project success.

There are many examples of renewable energy projects that have become highly controversial, generated public resistance and led, in some cases, to permission being refused because of the extent of opposition.
Some of these might have been badly conceived projects that were bound to generate public concern – others might have generated much less opposition and achieved a more constructive dialogue with local people if better communication and engagement practices had been followed.

Achieving mutual understanding and enabling a constructive dialogue are perhaps the most important objectives for engagement with the public.

While small hydro projects in the UK have not, in general, generated substantial public opposition, good practice in public engagement must be still followed.

Opinions and reactions can change over time and experience overseas (for example in Canada) has shown that substantial conflict and opposition to small hydro projects can appear. A few highly publicised cases of public opposition can easily begin to produce a wider feeling that small hydro ‘might not be so good after all’.

In addition,

Engagement can get practical help from locals:

Hedon looked at very small-scale (under 5kW) projects in Africa, and although the situation there is obviously different from here in the North West of the UK, the message is the same, that garnering public support can even lead to public participation in the project, and may help to secure practical help.

Engagement can save time and costs:

A report from a European Small Hydropower Association conference stresses that it is better to approach ‘stakeholder involvement’ (where stakeholders are any individuals or groups in the local area or with an interest in the development) not just as a ritual (e.g. of doing as little as possible, because you are obliged to). Describing rural hydropower projects it was stressed that there should be a “sensitive approach to communications during the planning process”, and that the possibility of employment prospects for local people (perhaps for any civil engineering involved, or in carrying out a feasibility study) could go beyond gaining acceptance to enthusiasm. It also says that “Responsible planning avoids conflict, enhances acceptability, and thus also saves time and costs.”

Engagement overcomes misunderstandings:

The same organisation also saw one of the main barriers to public acceptance of small-scale hydropower as being a lack of understanding of the technology in the wider public. The educational aspects of public engagement in developing a project can therefore help the understanding and acceptance of the technology and the industry as a whole: “One of the main constraints Small Hydropower has to face is the social barrier due to little information the public opinion has about this technology... ESHA believes that these ideas are due to a misinformed general public who makes no difference between the small and large hydropower schemes…As a consequence, we are unfairly accused of some environmental impacts out of our responsibility.” (p.4)

Similarly, the IEA (International Energy Agency) “believes that the successful future of hydropower is, to a degree, dependent on articulating a clear and objective message about the advantages and disadvantages of hydropower technology. The underlying belief is that well-planned, constructed and operated hydropower represents a viable competitive renewable energy technology. While there are consequences of this technology, resulting in either social or environmental impacts, there are also benefits associated with development and operations that result in relatively clean energy technology, when compared to currently available alternatives.” (p.3)

The Microgeneration Strategy of 2006 stated that at that time there were 90 micro-hydro installations in the UK, and argued that the technology can be particularly well suited to public engagement and through it, environmental education: “Small-scale hydro-power schemes have good potential to raise public awareness and support for renewables. The impact will be greater with group or community schemes as individual schemes are rarer and tend to be out of public view. Micro-hydro is largely non-controversial, although it can cause problems with fishing and water abstraction in low flow rivers. The largest resource exists in Scotland and Wales.” (p.49)

Engagement can reduce project risks:

The Philippines government, for example, also stresses that consulting with stakeholders also helps to reduce project risks through identifying them early: “The DOE shall involve all stakeholders in the decision-making processes prior to the implementation of hydropower projects. This would ensure the protection of the rights of communities which may be affected by specific projects. At the same time, project risks will be easier to ascertain through consultations and social assessment activities conducted jointly with all affected stakeholders.” In the context of small-scale schemes, these risks will primarily be the emergence of objections or the failure to deal with or mitigate concerns and impacts at an early stage, leading to failure to obtain either an extraction licence or planning permission.

If the project is planned within a Conservation Area, or involves any listed buildings or industrial archaeology (which weirs can be considered), then this raises the likelihood of the need for an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), and the Conservation Officer of the LPA should be involved as early as possible. The Conservation Officer should expect or demand an EIA (refer to EIA section below)if the project is in a conservation area or it involves a listed building.

It also directs you to the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR)’s Low Carbon Buildings Programme which provides micro-generation grants for householders [. Note that recipients of these grants must use accredited installers and materials, and the website provides a list of accredited installers.

There are a number of case study projects (see below) which have involved these special planning issues, such as the Arkwright Trust’s development of one of the earliest hydro-powered factories, which is “within the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, within the Cromford Conservation Area, is a Grade I Listed Building and within the Peak District Local Biodiversity Action Plan area.”

As a result, “the proposed works will require planning permission from Derbyshire Dales District Council (DDDC), which will have to consider its location within the World Heritage Site, its impact on the Grade I listed building, and on the biodiversity and other interests in the locality.” See also the Glen Lyn project (within a Site of Special Scientific Interest or SSSI), the Tintern Abbey project developed in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) , and Sowton Mill, also developed on an old mill site.

If your potential scheme does not have special planning considerations, then the main planning issues are closely related to the requirements for gaining an extraction licence from the Environment Agency (see section 4 below). In summary, these are:

Impacts on fish (which may require a specialist survey)

Angling, Fisheries (these stakeholders may have special interests due to ‘riparian’ (hunting) rights over the relevant stretch of water)

Planning permission

Land drainage consent (this is not always necessary, but applies to works on the banks of a water-course). There are also the responsibilities of ‘riparian rights’ holders, the land-owners whose property extends to and includes the water banks and the watercourse, and suggests that: “At the planning application stage, an appropriate FRA [Flood Risk Assessment]will be required to demonstrate how flood risk from all sources of flooding to the development itself and flood risk to others will be managed now and taking climate change into account. Policies in LDDs [Local Development Documents] should require FRAs to be submitted with planning applications in areas of flood risk identified in the plan. The FRA should be prepared by the developer in consultation with the LPA. The FRA should form part of an Environmental Statement when one is required by the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) (England and Wales) Regulations 1999 as amended.”

MENDIP suggests that “Alterations to watercourses require consent from the appropriate authority. In the case of smaller watercourses Land Drainage Consent is required from the District Council. The District Council can help advise who to apply to.” As a rule of thumb, an LDC will only apply to smaller water-courses rather than rivers, and where a flood risk has been identified.

An EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) is needed for a >500kW project as a statutory requirement, and can cost up £50k. BUT you should talk to the planning authority and Environment Agency to get advice on how detailed it needs to be, it can be a ‘4 page’ document, simple, and even done by the development ‘team’ with sufficient expertise. The important point is that the full range of issues and potential impacts are recognised, assessed, and if necessary, mitigated within the document.

For further advice on planning issues, visit the government’s ‘planning portal’.

The main issues with obtaining an extraction/impound licence from the Environment Agency (remember that planning permission is routinely subject to attaining this licence) are

• The particular operation of the type of power scheme or technology
  
  
• The mitigation of impacts on fish, usually requires either an assessment of an existing fish pass/ladder, or the construction of one, or else the addition of screening to prevent fish from entering a device that would otherwise injure or kill them.
  
  
• Working out how the ‘residual flow’ of the river can be maintained.

In the first instance it is advisable to talk to the local Planning Authority (either the local authority planning department or the national park planning authority in the Lake District), and to the relevant Environment Agency officer, to get a summary of the issues that will have to be addressed in your specific project site. As mentioned above, the issues that need to be addressed for planning permission and for an extraction licence overlap, and those with experience in implementing a community-scale project suggest that people:

• Get a ‘personal champion’ in the Environment Agency to coordinate communication between different divisions of the Environment Agency and push it forward.
• Do the ‘detailed design’ with the Environment Agency
• Take the following time for planning into consideration. A “Validation Requirement” from the authority planning officer will be needed. Early on, find out the detail, scale etc of the detailed diagrams that will be required and provide the right level of detail to planners and to the Environment Agency to forestall further requirements for details. It can take up to 6 months to ‘validate’, 2 months from planning and 4 months from the Environment Agency licensing section.
• Leave submitting the planning application until you are sure you have the Environment Agency on board! Planners will anyway contact the ‘planning section’ of the Environment Agency, not water resources…

The identification of other acceptability issues is one of the central purposes of your engagement activities at all stages, and recording such issues as they are raised by e.g. stakeholders, interest groups and members of the public should complement the formal stages of the project assessment that are required for planning and extraction licence processes. Going beyond what it is strictly required in producing an assessment is best practice, although the importance of issues should be judged on a case-by-case basis. If an issue can be addressed with a minimum investment of time and other resources, to the satisfaction of those who raised it, the process of engaging and responding has been fulfilled.

In this section, there is a summary of the different kinds of issues of acceptability that have been raised in project development and public meetings, beyond the technical and environmental considerations that would be dealt with in a feasibility study or environmental impact assessment (EIA).

The following are a series of groups of issues that have been raised regarding small-scale hydro that should be thought about:

Objections from local people tend to be based on a small number of issues:

The siting of the technology in a beauty spot/historical site

Responses: This can often (in the North West) be countered by pointing out the historical nature of the site as a water-power location, and/or by drawing on the historical interest in the Industrial Revolution. The view that the ‘environmental qualities’ of a river are destroyed by a hydropower project are often based on a misunderstanding of the impacts. However, experience with wind power in particular shows that visual impact is a very powerful focus for opposition, and should be taken seriously. In one project, an individual photographer complained on aesthetic grounds, and initiated a ‘Town Green’ application for the site. If successful, such an application could be a ‘show-stopper’ for your project, however in this case the individual was not widely supported. In the case of many projects, the installation will often be re-using existing infrastructure (i.e. the weir). One project turned this to advantage as revealed by their ‘strap-line’ of the project utilising “220 year old weir, 2000-yr old technology [an Archimedean Screw], and 150 year old social structure [an Industrial Provident Society or Co-operative]”.

Objections or queries on the basis of the disruption involved not being justified by the amount of energy (or income) that the devices generate, that they do not make enough of a contribution to energy production or to climate change mitigation.

Responses: Hydropower fares well in comparison with other energy generation methods or ‘green investments’ in a number of ways. For example:

In some cases there may be a 10 year payback length (although this should not be assumed!), which is comparable to other renewables technologies. In terms of costing a price of 8p/kWh can often be guaranteed, and smaller projects can generate ‘double ROCs’(see finance section of this website).

In comparison with wind turbines and farms hydropower is smaller and less (visually) intrusive, compared to wind technology that is larger, more visible, and often on a hill in valued landscape.

Stress the contribution that your project can make in easily-understandable terms. A 70kW capacity device provides energy equivalent to the average needs of 65 houses, which is a significant contribution for an investment of £200-300,000. You could work out how much energy your project would produce and express it in ‘streetlamps’ or one-bar electric fires (both use roughly 1 kW/hr) to help the public to understand. Equivalence figures for output can be found on the OFGEM website.

One document cites an average household consumption of 24,790kWh being used in Ofgem’s Cost Benefit Analysis Model (2006). A later figure is cited as 3,300kwh of electricity and 20,500kwh of gas per year (so 23,800kW total energy use), correct as of 2nd March 2007. Once the size of your generator can be worked out, so can the number of likely kWh, which you can divide by the average consumption of a house. Another suggested approach to get public support if appropriate is to tie in the idea of all streetlights in a nearby village being supplied by renewable energy.

The issue of ‘embedded energy’ is sometimes raised, suggesting that the energy required to construct and install renewable energy technologies will not be ‘paid off’ by its output. The DTI (BERR, now DECC) has produced figures of construction:generation ratios of 1:1200 for hydro as compared to 1:800 for wind. This means that over its lifetime, a hydropower projection ought to produce 1200kW for every kW of construction, transportation, materials etc.

From some individuals, there are questions about noise impact

Response: In most cases, the noise of the generating machinery will be quieter than that of the surrounding water flow anyway.

There can be accusations of impacts on fish populations, especially if there are salmon populations.

Response: In the case of a small-scale low-head hydropower scheme being developed in Settle, planning permission was turned down based on a lack of information about potential fish impacts, so this is an important issue to address (see other sections of this website). It is claimed by the project developers that the refusal resulted from a lack of communication between the Planning Unit (now Consents) and Fisheries staff within the Environment Agency, making the earlier advice about making contact with an appropriate EA officer even more important.

The following aspects are also worth thinking about to prepare for potential acceptability issues being raised in the course of your engagement activities, they arise from issues raised within public meetings and presentations by project developers:

Warnings

Do not try to second-guess the costs. Almost all projects incur unexpected costs and a margin of increase should be expected.

Public Liability Insurance was an unexpected cost in the Torrs Hydro project (risks identified included people climbing into the device, equipment breakdown, revenue loss, and damage to the weir structure itself (old)). Another project developer suggests that the group took a very cautious or even over-cautious approach to Health and Safety assessment. There is another project/installation in North Yorkshire that has not added any form of insurance. A member of the project group had experience with Health and Safety assessments, so this is perhaps a case where the wide skills base of the group worked against them!

Health and Safety aspects generally cover responsibility and accountability for general safety and providing safety from the system to all persons working on the plant and apparatus. The Health and Safety Executive should be able and willing to give initial advice.

The initial ‘ball-park/back on an envelope’ estimates of generation figures are for estimating whether your project is likely to be financially viable, but the real-life operation of the plant is likely to throw up surprises. Over the lifetime of a project though, the figures can be relied upon.

Financial

Landowner lease – think about this aspect very early as lease arrangements can be complicated. Funders may demand it to be in place before agreeing to provide grants. The British Hydropower Association guideline is to offer 4% to the landowner.

Access to site – the easier the better! Poor access issues can be a major added cost when the project is implemented or civil engineering takes place.

Some funders insist on and assess various ‘soft’ factors of a project as criteria for providing funding. As an example they may stress the educational impact of a project by e.g. the numbers of schoolchildren visiting the site. Fulfilling these criteria is essential and can be combined with engagement and addressing public acceptability, so set up possibilities early, even during feasibility investigations.

It is a good idea to cast funding net widely for grants, but also pay attention to the criteria, e.g. see the above re schoolchildren. Those in receipt of grants are responsible for fulfilling the criteria, even if a third party has been involved in drafting or writing the application.

In conclusion, one project developer suggested that some issues may be raised unnecessarily, and that they should be challenged e.g. continual requests for more ‘expert studies’. In their particular project a geomorphology report was requested and conducted, but the group later discovered that the report had not even been read.

Some General Principles of Public Engagement

• Approach engagement as a two-way process of both informing and listening.
  
  
• Be open and honest in your interactions with others.
  
  
• Remember that people can have very different perspectives and opinions than your own – listen carefully and try to understand these, rather than rejecting them out of hand.
  
  
• Remember that there are many ‘subgroups’ within ‘the public’, with particular interests, concerns or characteristics.
  
  
• Recognise that people can have considerable expertise about their local area, its history, its conservation and heritage value and the way that rivers and surrounding environments behave and change over time.
  
  
• Find ways in which your project may provide benefits to local people – from an educational resource through to a share of income from electricity generated.
  
  
• Recognise that good engagement requires the dedication of effort and resources and should not be approached as an ‘afterthought’.
  
  
• Begin your engagement from the earliest stage possible, when plans are still evolving and there are opportunities for discussion and changes to be made – avoid the DAD ‘decide-announce-defend’ syndrome.

There is no one formula for effective public engagement. Every small-scale hydro project is different – particularly in terms of the characteristics of the place that the project is located in, the nature of the local community, local formal and informal politics, geography and history. There is however a common ‘engagement process’ or series of steps that can be progressed through in order to determine what is appropriate in any one situation and to formulate a project-specific engagement strategy.

Step 1: Get the context first

Make sure that you collect as much information as possible about the context surrounding your potential project: the history of the site (if relevant); any ownership, access and rights issues (e.g. ‘riparian’ rights held by landowners – usually angling) including public rights of way; grid connection possibilities.Step 2: Identify the key players

Identify as many key players as possible, perhaps by brainstorming with others from the area. The more people are involved in the early stages in identifying as many networks as they can think of, the more comprehensive your engagement will be and the less likely it will be that you suddenly face an unexpected surprise, a stakeholder who is angry that they weren’t consulted for example.

Step 3: “Test the water”

Even before any formal process of consultation or engagement is begun, putting out feelers will enable you to assess how much need there is for what degree of engagement. In terms of acceptability, this will mean identifying people who definitely want to be kept ‘on board’ with the progress of the project, and those who should be included as valid stakeholders or affected parties. This ‘testing’ stage can be combined with step 2 if the invitation to different parties to offer their thoughts on the principle of the project identifies interest and concerns.

Step 4: Design the engagement process

As we have stressed, each project will be unique in the need for engagement if the purpose is to secure acceptance. It is costly or time-consuming to do too much in the way of engagement if there is general support for the project anyway. While it is always better to err on the side of being too inclusive (in terms of informing and involving as many groups and individuals as possible), it does not make sense to waste scant resources on preaching to the converted. Depending on the way in which the project is set up, active engagement of different publics may be a necessary factor anyway e.g. in involving supporters as share-holders in a community scale scheme.
By way of comparison, here is another community consultation outline on the website of an environmental consultancy:

1. Understand the community, the key stakeholders and the local representatives. Ensure you know the local community, key issues and personalities before you approach anyone.
2. Brief key players early. Inform them before engaging the community in wider consultation. Their comments can add real impetus and insight into proposed planning applications.
3. Engage the wider community in an open and transparent way. Ensure that you consult widely enough to satisfy local stakeholders and officers.”

And the following points of advice are taken from a document aimed at people involved in scoping for potential hydro-power development opportunities over a broader area, such as regional development agencies:

1. Find a key partner who is actively involved in the small hydro approval or planning process to act as a leader. This could be a local authority, the prefect, the local water agency, a national park or regional park, etc. The important thing is that there is a leader who will keep the process going through the administrative treacle that will always threaten to overwhelm it, and won’t take no for an answer.
2. Get key local stakeholders involved. You are going to need to all the support you can get from those representing the different interests affected by small hydro. You need therefore to involve them in the appraisal of sites, in promoting sustainable projects and in selling the message….
3. Get information from universally accepted expertise. It is important to involve respected and independent experts in evaluating resources – for instance, archaeological heritage, and water quality. The acceptability of your plan will depend on it.
4. Integrate your plan into the statutory planning documents if at all possible. The plan will have that much greater weight if it is part of the statutory process and this will force the different government and local government bodies to take account of it. There are various possibilities, and the priority depends on the approval process in the country concerned – local development plan, regional strategic plan, climate change strategy, etc…
5. Allow adequate time. Plans take time, and if the local community is to be adequately involved, a lot of time. But time, and the involvement of the local community, give you the chance to produce a document with weight. Don’t underestimate this and allow years, not months.
6. Search for synergies. Small hydro can have other benefits. Restoring historic mills for example allows one to maintain them as a local tourism and heritage resource. Using riverbed structures to produce energy means that there may be someone with an interest in maintaining them – important for river regulation. Search these out and promote them since these may be stronger arguments for your project than the energy produced.
7. Go public. There will always be interests that don’t want to participate, or simply say “No!” out of fear, “Let’s ignore this proposal and it will go away”. The planning process must be public. You are trying to make people participate and peer pressure helps here. Once you involve them in a team working towards the same end, sustainability, you should find that solutions are found to conflicts of interest, and they are less frightened of the problems.

Beyond the people who have to be contacted through the permissions processes of planning and an abstraction licence, there are other ‘stakeholders’ and interested parties who it would be advisable to contact from the outset.
The following is a ‘checklist’ of the main constituencies and stakeholders that you must ensure you have contacted early on in your engagement process:

• Landowner (a lease will have to be arranged)
• Environment Agency, including the Permits/Consents Unit, Fisheries and Water Resources
• Local Authority, including Conservation officer, Development control, Planning Department, and any interested or supportive councillors.
• Grid Provider
• ‘Customers’ for energy – either a company that will arrange a PPA (Power Purchase Arrangement), or a grid-connected building near to the site.
• Press and media, local, national and special interest (environmental, ‘green’, social enterprise and energy-related)
• Anglers/fisheries
• Highways Agency
• British Waterways (if a canal is involved)
• Interested
• “The Public”
• Local: local residents; local businesses via Chamber of Commerce; local landowners; local ‘greens’, including FoE; schools’ forum; PTA; Churches Forum; WI; Rotary Club; local politicians
• Regional/National: County-wide ‘greens’; FoE Regional coordinators; non-local green investors; investors in similar projects elsewhere

In view of a limited budget adopt a PR-led, as opposed to an advertising-led, strategy, focussing on press, personal contact via email and newsletters, use of websites and word of mouth, building awareness at a local level

Communication

There is a whole suite of methods and practices that can be included in an engagement process. Some of them are formal and others informal. From the 4 step process, it can be seen that the earliest processes are those of collecting addresses and contacts for different individuals and groups, and inviting them to meet formally in a group or informally with yourself and discuss how engagement should progress. At the earliest opportunity, you should be open and transparent with all of your thinking about the project, including all those facts that are fairly fixed (the size of the project, the exact site etc), as well as those areas that are less certain at the early stages, such as the details of exact impacts or work that needs to be carried out to ascertain them.

One of the surest ways to provoke antagonism is to give the impression that you are not being open with people who have an interest in what is proposed. Local environmental groups, campaigners, and schools or colleges may be interested from an early stage in the educational prospects of your project. Email lists are a good way of building up a community of interest in the project as it develops from the first suggestion, and can keep people up to date with developments, or access help from people with useful experience and skills (see Building a Group, below). Even the smallest scale project can benefit from the help, advice and expertise of others, and these people need not only to be contacted but communicated with on a regular basis if they are to be transformed into participants. A simple website such as a blog is another recommended method of updating people with progress without overburdening them with emails.

Meetings and/or exhibitions

There should be a public meeting and/or an exhibition tied into the early stages of the permissions process, to gauge and increase the level of support. Such events are best held in a location that is familiar to local people and not exclusive to one group or type of users. Village Halls and Community Centres are the paradigm examples of venues. Decide in advance what kind of event is most suitable. Is this primarily for the public at large and interested individuals, or is it mainly intended to appeal to interested parties and stakeholders? Tailor your engagement to the level of expertise involved.

To paraphrase a council website: “a public meeting is a meeting to bring people together to share information, exchange ideas, and to develop relationships and contacts. Attendance should be open to any interested member of the public or a particular community. Public meetings allow for a two-way information flow. Their very nature means they are open to all and everyone is entitled to express an opinion. They create a focal point of activity where people can share perspectives and concerns, hear other points of view, identify tensions and agree on resolutions for action.”

Many people are most accustomed to a traditional ‘public meeting’ format with a presentation and speakers, followed by a question and answer session, but in order to hold this kind of meeting, it is useful to have someone experienced in chairing such events. Think about who is going to present the information that is available about the project and in what format. Powerpoint or slideshow presentations are the norm these days, and many people will want to see pictures and other visual material rather than listen to a spoken presentation involving facts and figures.

Comprehensible and familiar comparisons (“would fit under a car bonnet”/”as large as a garden shed”/”the width of this room”) should be used whenever possible. It goes without saying that a trial run of the presentation can avoid the inevitable problems with technology! Members of the research team that produced this website were invited to present at numerous public meetings where projects at different stages of development were being unveiled, and it is worth considering contacting people who have had past experience of project development at the same scale as the one you are considering (see the case study material). The timing of such formal engagement exercises is also important. Public meetings should always be held in the evening or at the weekend to enable people with work and childcare commitments the most opportunity to attend.

Be aware too, that public meetings where people are addressed from a stage or ‘on high’ need to be conducted with a good facilitator or chairperson, and to allow genuine opportunities for questions, advice and opinions to come from the floor, to be taken seriously and responded to wherever possible, as this format of engagement exercise has traditionally been associated with attracting opponents, and those with pre-existing views on the topic. They should therefore be listened to and treated with respect to avoid antagonism (see General Principles, above).

With an exhibition, it is possible for information material to be made available (e.g. on boards, through a laptop and projector) for viewing over a longer period of time. A traditional combination for many renewable energy projects is thus an afternoon exhibition followed by an evening meeting. Such exhibitions can be low-tech and relatively inexpensive (if resources such as free-standing pin-boards and large-size printing can be accessed, but may still be beyond the resources or ambitions of, for example, a household-scale project. Presentation materials that are less professional-looking may seem to reduce credibility, but they will be appreciated more than no material at all if the purpose of the engagement is to provide information and detail for examination and comment.

At all times it is good to avoid wasted effort, so make use of any material that has been provided to you (e.g. through contacts established in the earlier steps), especially if any detailed diagrams that will be used for e.g. the ‘validation requirement’ (see section 3) are available. Pictures of potential technologies can be sourced from the internet. Photographs of the site should be provided, and it is recommended that at the very least a simple ‘artist’s impression’ should convey roughly the anticipated size of the finished installation, and the configuration and exact location. Including a human figure in visual materials will help to convey scale. All materials provided for the meeting and/or exhibition should also be made available through a project website or blog, if one is available.

Site visits

Visits to the potential site will anyway be required at an early stage (pre-feasibility), and site visits are a very immediate way of engaging people with the potential project. Invite people along to see the site. One project (Torrs Hydro) took walking tours or visits to the site every weekend during development, arranged a follow-up ‘year-on’ public meeting for those who had attended the initial engagement activities, and facilitated over 40 visits to the site in the 3 months since the project became operational. Education activities may be a criterion for acquiring funding from certain sources and can be tied into the engagement processes.

Information provision

This should be maintained through the email lists or blog or website as suggested above, and if resources permit, other channels such as leafleting, more permanent displays (noticeboards in public buildings and libraries, even schools) or media stories should be considered. This is particularly important when associated with the formal stages of engagement such as the meeting/exhibition, the planning permission consultation period(s), when important milestones are achieved (such as the production of a feasibility study, the securing of funding etc) and in conjunction with any fund-raising activities (such as share offers related to a community-scale project, see later). A constant process of information provision will raise project awareness and convey transparency to the public, interest groups and other organisations alike.

Organisations offering advice/services relating to engagement for renewable projects

A large number of private consultancies (and much fewer not-for-profit organisations) offer advice or services relating to the kinds of engagement activities that you may want to develop in taking your project forward. Below are the details of a small selection, and more can be found using web searches. Inclusion here does not constitute endorsement:

Private

Ultimately, we act to deliver political and community support for planning applications.” Engage Planning contains a lot of useful advice on engagement activities and their benefits, but the consultancy itself focuses on house-building applications.
“We work with both the development team and the local authority to communicate planning issues to the wider community providing a two-way flow of information. Our programmes of work are constructed to provide the best value for our clients and ensure a high-quality level of consultation is maintained throughout the project.” Services offered include Public exhibitions, Community evenings, Workshops, Steering groups, Press liaison, Project websites, Information leaflets and Newsletters.

REP outlines the strategy taken by Mistral PR company to a renewable community consultation.
“REP provides leading community engagement services using interactive websites, door-to-door mailings, exhibitions, etc. REP use online public consultations to gather information on public concerns that can then be addressed. These consultations also provide statistical information about public opinion, which is helpful in explaining the true nature of public opinion to planning authorities. REP have been commended by the Welsh Assembly for their community engagement practices.”

Not-for-profit

Seeds For Change is a not-for-profit consultancy that specialises in helping with meetings, grassroots groups organisation and campaigning. There is an activism focus rather than project development, but the lessons on how to effectively run groups may be useful.

There are different ways of developing and deploying a project, which will involve different numbers of people, different ways of financing it, different options for distributing the benefits and different opportunities for positive engagement. This section offers advice and resources for setting up a scheme in the ‘mode’ [make ‘modes’ a web-link to Walker and Cass paper?]of a community group, charity or social enterprise, a model which has implications both for engagement and acceptability, transforming both into positive aspects. The advice focuses on the social enterprise (IPS or Co-operative) model, as one which has had demonstrable success, and which is considered ‘best practice’ in terms of government policy on community renewable energy schemes., but begins with advice that is more applicable to any project.

Building a Group

Unless you are intending to develop and implement your project completely in isolation, it is likely that you will need to establish some sort of project group. Potential members should be identified in the 4-step process outlined before, and other interested parties can come on board as awareness is raised. The following points are taken from presentations by directors of two community-scale projects and two project development consultants.
The following skills are useful in a project development group:

• Volunteers who are willing to help out. Almost every community will include retired engineers
• Shareholder group (If a share offer is part of the fundraising process) will include people willing to offer advice and support, and are a wide pool of potential expertise and experience.
• Need to have ideological commitment. Local environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace may provide a pool of people already committed to renewable energy in advance of your project. Watching progress, videos etc on internet very good idea!!
• Administration and internet skills. Skills involving setting up mailing lists, keeping (e.g. excel) databases of contacts and correspondence will be vital. At any engagement opportunity/event, remember to collect email addresses as well as telephone numbers!

At a later stage of project development, people will be required to oversee many more aspects including:

• Financial accounts/Insurance for plant and personnel/Energy trading. More simply a bank account will be needed for whatever company or financial entity is used, so make sure you set one up and make sure enough people can access or manage it.
• Engineering/ Maintenance and safety/ Risk assessment
• Operations and safety/Risk assessment
• Legal aspects/Contracts. As an example, securing finance may involve deciding whether the installed technology counts as assets in terms of liability – if it fails, who gets the kit? This depends on the legal structure adopted, and different funders will have different timescales of involvement: none, 6 years, or without limit.
• Engagement skills include managing relationships with the public and stakeholders and shareholders, other organisations such as the planners and Environment Agency, and the press and the media. Experience with conflict resolution or social work, voluntary work and education, can all provide useful skills for a group.

It is worth considering how the group will be structured and run. Are such persons to be contractors or directly employed? How are they to be paid? Retainer fees? Time and materials? Are there to be directors? Will there be any remuneration, and if so, how will this be decided? How will appointments be decided? Enthusiastic volunteers? Contractually engaged professionals? A mixture of the above?

The following organisations can offer advice on running a local group, especially in the social enterprise model:

• For NW - CMS is a worker's co-operative, offering support and advice for co-operative groups.
• Seeds For Change Lancaster - this activism and campaign-based workers co-operative no longer offers much advice on the legal and structural aspects of setting up a business, but facilitation for co-operatives and social enterprises who are starting up, getting them to work out all the basics (aims, mission, membership criteria, day to day running, questions on decision making etc).

For community development aspects of engagement (community outreach, campaigning etc with 'normal' people rather than setting up social enterprises) you may want to contact Sostenga, based in West Yorkshire.

Options for the legal structure of a community-owned or operated scheme

Future Energy Yorkshire has developed a way of assessing the appropriateness of different financial models for RET schemes, a decision tree that includes questions such as: do you want directors? Dividends to shareholders or owners? Are the profits to be reinvested in the community or used to lever other funds? Answering the questions should produce a resultant choice of model.

The ‘Social Business Model’ stresses social enterprise rather than the ‘grant dependency’ of charities, and an ethical/value choice about attitudes to community, self-reliance etc. Its advantages include:

• An ability to achieve a mix of finance sources, attracting grants, social equity and loans.
• The social equity factor is raised through a share offer, and is based on the idea (expressed by a Settle Hydro director) that “there are people out there who generally invest in environmentally friendly things, so we try to get them to invest in ca venture that is community-based AND green ”
• A community-based group draws on the “vested interest people have in something on their doorstep, individuals wanted to donate and help financially”. As an IPS (Industrial Provident Society) structure cannot receive donations, unlike a charity, the share offer is intended to draw on this local goodwill, as well as national sources.
• The Cooperative Society and Cooperative Bank/Group are good sources of help and money (bank loan/equity) if your project adopts a social business model.

Why use an IPS structure specifically?

• You will need a legal structure anyway, to pursue finance for the project, and an IPS can place and sign contracts as a legal entity.
• The IPS structure is an affordable company model.
• It can accept and attract grants, especially through the ‘community’ benefits aspects.
• An IPS can accept bank loans (the specific arrangements in the example projects include no ‘assets’ being involved, and a secured loan with a 10-year, fixed interest rate of 6.75%), and can make a public share offer, drawing funds from both the interested local community and (by law)the broader public.

Other options for the ‘social business’ modes include Community Interest Companies and Charity status.

Community Interest Companies (CICs) have been promoted heavily in the voluntary sector and by the government, but have their own implications. For example, they cannot receive gift-aid like a charity. It is however possible to issue a share offer under FSA rules as a CIC.

Charities:

• Traditionally have not been able to approach people for donations but in effect have done.
• They can also get loans for specific purposes, meaning that if your project is to be approached as a charity, you must from the outset draw your charitable aims broadly, e.g. to allow regeneration as an aim/function of charity. This has only recently become legal, with the Prince’s Trust setting the precedent.
• Charity status also means that loans made to a charity legally can later be transformed into gifts as the behest of the loaner.
• A lot of grant funders will ONLY give grants to charities, enabling grant funds to be sourced from outside the immediate or regional area of the community.
• Business activities are familiarly undertaken through a ‘trading arm’ as a subsidiary of a charity structure.

In the final analysis, the choice of structure should perhaps be down to the local community as represented through your local group and engagement activities: what are their values? Do they want to be a charity? Or a commercial company? A social enterprise?

Share offer

Assuming that your project wishes to raise ‘social equity’ through a share offer, the following advice has been offered.

• Set a reasonable and attractive level of ‘investment’ for the share offer. A lower level e.g. a minimum of £250, is more likely to attract more (particularly local) shareholders than with minimum of £500.
• The FSA maximum investment for this mode of share offer is £10,000.
• The share offer must be open to all members of the UK public, so this ‘pool’ should be exploited, but the more investors are local, the better. Settle’s shareholders are around 50% local, in Torrs the figure was slightly lower.
• The projects can expect to provide a return of around 7.5% to investors, seen as a good level of return between a bank rate and other investments. The 7.5% figure comes from a project lifetime of 10-25yrs, and ‘works’ under the IPS model.
• Returns to shareholders and to the community
• Set certain dates/deadlines for raising a set amount of money, and early on organise your marketing and promotion plan:
• Frame in terms of green debates e.g. about energy, climate change and energy security or self-reliance
• Identify your ‘target markets’, locally there should be many groups (local residents; local businesses via Chamber of Commerce; local landowners; local ‘greens’, including FoE; schools’ forum; PTA; Churches Forum; WI; Rotary Club; local politicians etc) and regionally or nationally, other groups (county-wide ‘greens’; FoE Regional coordinators; non-local green investors; investors in similar projects elsewhere)
• Promotion – utilise public events for stalls, and set up public meetings, stress the idea of active support, i.e. ‘come along if you want to support it!’
• Press – go for saturation coverage especially in local newspapers.
• Website (if used) - try to get and maintain a national focus.
• At the outset, work out the budget for all this and the (human) resources available in your group.
• Ensure that your group includes people who can deal with the media and the public - a public face, and (perhaps a different person) a media coordinator, who will chase up media contacts.
• The promotion plan should include the following aspects, which can obviously double as engagement activities more generally:
• Press – build good contacts, regular supply of newsworthy releases and photo opportunities, identify spokespeople
• Email – create a database and send out updates at regular intervals
• Word of mouth – an invaluable free form of publicity – check people have background info
• Events – Information Days, Launch Event, Open Evening, Site tours
• Public Meetings – local council, Chamber of Commerce, WI etc
• Website – regularly update, create links to other websites
• Publicity – Prospectus and flier – designed for web and hard copy; consider posters and leaflets
• Local Newsletters – council publications etc