Community / Call to overcome Viking division to secure future community wealth building
OVERCOMING the division the Viking Energy project has created in the community is one of the preconditions for islanders to be able to demand better returns from future renewable energy projects.
This is the view of Daniel Gear and Tom Wills, the two authors of a research paper created to inform the Just Transition Commission’s report on Shetland, launched at Mareel on Tuesday morning.
Wills, a director of local energy consultancy Voar, said the hope was that people with opposing views with regards to the 443MW wind farm would be able to find some common ground so that the real danger of an unjust transition to net zero can be avoided or at least mitigated.
During the discussion on Tuesday, Wills pointed out that just 0.6 per cent of local renewables generation – installed and consented – was community owned, yet it generated a similar amount of return – about £2 million annually – than SSE’s Viking wind farm.
He described the current community benefit scheme which sees SSE paying £5,000 per installed megawatt as “poor” and advocated a benefit scheme that would be based on revenue.
Ultimately, however the community should strive to take “some form of ownership” in any future renewable energy projects, as Shetland was facing developments on a scale “that we have never seen before”. There are currently 2.8GW of floating offshore wind in the very early planning stage, and several developers are working on plans for large scale hydrogen production.
The commission’s report A Just Transition for Shetland labelled the Viking wind farm as a “missed opportunity” with regards to community benefit and community wealth building and warned that there was a risk of repeating those mistakes.
It calls for local people to formulate and to take ownership of a local just transition action plan.
Speaking after the launch event, co-chair of the Just Transition Commission Satwat Rehman said: “Local just transition action plans will have to be developed locally, based on local conditions.
“For Shetland the just transition plan may look very different to what it might look like for Glasgow city.
“The plans would not be implementable unless they are developed locally by local people.”
Gear said one possible outcome would be an unjust transition to net zero.
“The work we have to do here is to make sure that that doesn’t happen”, he said, adding that the commission’s report was a first step on that journey.
Wills said: “There is an opportunity here for the whole community of Shetland, and not just the council, but also the community groups, to work towards a kind of collective community view of what it is we want to happen.
“It is about control, and it is about benefit. The people who live in Shetland be able to decide how much development is too much development.
“And the people who live in Shetland should get a fair share of the value of Shetland resources being extracted.
“How do we get those things? In the first instance we need to be able to say: ‘this is the community’s position’, but we are not currently able to do that because in part of division created by Viking.
“That project created division in the community that hasn’t healed, and that is hampering our ability to have a collective community voice on this question.
“The risk at the moment is that we are facing a scale of development that the majority of folk in Shetland wouldn’t want; and we are facing a tiny fraction of the resource value being retained in Shetland, and that is not a just transition.”
Gear added: “The unmeasured cost of Viking is that it has impacted the community’s ability to organise, and part of the work we have got to do here is trying to rebuild that ability to properly organise a community with a single vision.”
Both reports can be found on the Just Transition Commission website here.
