Scotland successfully puts citizens at the heart of offshore wind power

In our October success story of 2021, we travelled around Europe to understand how energy communities are involved in wind offshore projects. We learned that energy communities can and should have a stake in offshore wind!

Today, we are pleased to share exciting news from the UK about offshore wind energy.

A Falck Renewables partnership - working with Energy4All on a new framework which will allow Scottish communities to share in the benefits of the offshore wind energy projects - secured three sites in the Scotwind bidding process. The three areas could accommodate a total of approximately 3.0 GW of offshore wind capacity with the projects scheduled to be operational by the end of the decade.

Together with our members Energy4All and Community Energy England, we are celebrating this major success for the community energy sector in the UK.

Marna McMillin, Chief Executive of Energy4All, said:

"Climate breakdown is the key environmental challenge facing our society. If we are to successfully decarbonize our economy, we must rapidly replace polluting fossil fuels with clean power. This requires us to generate much more zero carbon electricity to heat our homes and power our vehicles. We need the public to support those changes, and we believe one of the best ways of ensuring that support is to allow individuals to have a share in those projects."

Falck Renewables has a 15-year track record of working with Energy4All having successfully set up seven co-operatives at its Scottish onshore wind farms, enabling thousands of people to buy a stake in their local wind farm.

We believe that partnerships of this sort could be a model for other offshore projects in both the UK and the rest of Europe.

Energy4All is a non-profit distributing co-operative social enterprise formed by the Baywind Energy Co-operative in 2002 to enable more communities to own and operate renewable energy projects. It has raised more than £80 million in capital for community owned renewable energy generation from wind, hydro, solar and biomass and now supports more than 30 successful community energy co-operatives operating in the UK with almost 17,000 members.

Tracey Heaward | Tracey@energy4all.co.uk

01229 821028