Collective democratic planning can make a just transition just for communities too

The ongoing campaign by a group of activists and community councils in the north of Scotland calling for a pause in the rollout of renewable energy infrastructure may seem counter to ambitions for a green transition, but they are not.

The activists are concerned that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of planning applications ongoing for major renewable energy infrastructure, a rate of application that makes it very difficult if not impossible for the communities living with this infrastructure to intervene in or influence its development.

What they articulating is unhappiness at the nature of a just transition being dictated only by fragmented private interests. Are all these developments needed? Are they all in the right place? Are they being built and managed properly? Are the proposers behind each project the best people to be put in charge of Scotland's energy? Are there better ways to achieve all of this?

This larger picture of energy transition is lost in the blizzard of detail contained in hundreds and hundreds of planning applications. There is very good reason to doubt whether the sum of these many fragmented parts ends up being what Scotland actually needs.

This, in turn, is a significant new problem faced by renewable energy in a way that wasn't faced by the preceding coal-and-gas era. Even when the ownership of that system was broken up and privatised, it still constituted a system which had a limited number of key nodes. A gas-powered turbine generating plant is a single entity that produces large volumes of energy in one place.

So is a nuclear plant. Linking these limited number of nodes with the transmission grid that transmits the energy round the country was comparatively straight forward, in geographical terms at least. (The transmission grid links energy generation to distribution grids and it is those which supply electricity to households.)

Planning a thermal electricity system like this is fairly straightforward. But once the generation capacity becomes fragmented, we reach something like the 'travelling salesman problem'; the number of possible paths between all these generation sites grows exponentially really quickly to the stage where even creating the criteria for the 'correct pattern' becomes harder and harder.

The outcome of this is a kind of planning chaos. It operates on the basis of how much any single development meets opposition, so it is often small rural communities who are sacrificed. The problem is that when you have over 700 developments, that's a lot of sacrificing.

Believing that an energy system should be developed for the public good and not the commercial good is not a reactionary position. Accepting that 'cheapest options' put forward by lots of commercial companies, each trying to maximise their profit, amounts to an overall outcome which is unlikely to be in the public interest.

There is an alternative to this which Common Weal has been proposing for a long time. We believe that a 'just transition' means a lot more than finding jobs for existing oil workers. Justice comes not just from replacing the incomes of one group of highly-unionised workers but also in how it treats communities, how it distributes the benefits of the new system, who pays and who gets the spillover economic activity.

That is not best secured by permitting a lot of private companies to minimise their expenditure on this transition. It comes from planning.

This is why we have been advocating for a Scottish Energy Development Agency. This would be a planning body which would design the future energy system as a whole, not just accept or reject any proposal a private developer or speculator brings to the table.

We need to plan change to bring gain to communities, not harm. What we are doing is harming communities who get little or no say in what is being done, all at the behest of an industry with powerful lobbyists and copious lawyers. A Scottish Energy Development Agency can return democratic power to Scotland to shape how its energy future impacts on its people and its communities.

You can find out more here.