Fostering Social Acceptance for Wind Power
Program: Intelligent Energy Europe
Beneficiary: EWEA, BE
Duration: 05/2014 – 10/2016
Budget: € 1.459.138,00 (DUNEA budget € 34.084,00)
WISE Power is an ambitious European project about the social acceptance of wind energy. WISE Power aims at significantly improving local engagement and support for wind turbines while enhancing local community participation in the planning and implementation of wind energy projects.
The project has a strong focus on alternative financing – such as community and cooperative funding of wind farms - as a method to enhance social engagement. It will investigate the potential of innovative models of financing wind farm projects and involve various stakeholders, such as alternative and green banks, cooperatives, public and other financing institutions, municipalities and renewable energy developers. WISE Power envisages a Finance Advisory Board that will regularly interact with project partners to provide insight and feedback.
The wind industry and other stakeholders will benefit from the WISE Power project’s collaborative approach in the sharing of best practices designed to increase social acceptance. These new and improved approaches will include innovative participation models for financing wind projects.
Tangible results will be:
- An analysis of existing approaches to increasing social acceptance for wind energy projects and associated grid infrastructures currently used by the wind industry in Europe;
- A monitoring tool that identifies barriers as well as supportive measures, complements current information and measures the overall performance of the project;
- Proposed Social Acceptance Pathways (SAPs), a guidance available in 10 European languages describing concrete steps to be taken in order to ensure community engagement and align different interests;
- A series of working validation meetings, test exercises (dry-runs) in four countries, engagement with ‘real life’ scenarios and actual developments to collect grass-roots feedback;
- Widespread dissemination and capacity building at local/regional, national and EU-level;
These findings are targeted at all stakeholders i.e. local communities, authorities, developers in the wind energy industry, system operators, citizens groups, cooperatives and social and environmental organizations.
Regional development agency DUNEA participate in this project as one of 14 partners from eight countries (Belgium, Spain, Croatia, Germany, Denmark, Greece, Italy, UK).www.wisepower-project.eu