Getting local communities on board with renewable energy, Australia edition

In this episode, Jarra Hicks of the Australian nonprofit
Community Power Agency talks about addressing rural resistance to
clean energy infrastructure through effective community
engagement.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


To hit its climate targets, the US must build an enormous amount
of new clean energy infrastructure. Much of that infrastructure
is going to be built in rural communities, and the resistance of
those communities to that infrastructure is one of the greatest
threats to the clean energy transition.


I've done a couple of pods on this subject and will probably do
more. Today, we're going to get something of an international
perspective.


When I was in Australia, I interacted with a broad network of
scholars and activists who are thinking seriously about the
social mechanics of community buy-in. One of those scholars and
activists is Jarra Hicks, who got her PhD at the University of
New South Wales with a dissertation on community-owned wind farms
in rural (or as they call them in Australia, “regional”)
communities. She now runs the Community Power Agency, a nonprofit
organization that is working to ensure a “faster and fairer
transition to clean energy.”


Among other things, Hicks has co-authored a benefit-sharing guide
and runs an online benefit-sharing course, both meant to help
renewable energy developers better navigate this tricky
territory.


I've been meaning catch up with Hicks ever since I returned from
Australia. Last week I finally got the chance — we talked about
the problem of rural resistance, the balance between community
engagement and speed, and the many varieties of benefit sharing.
I think it will be clear to everyone how this knowledge transfers
into the US context. I enjoyed it immensely and hope you do too.


All right then. Jarra Hicks, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much
for coming.


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, thanks for having me.


David Roberts


This is a topic of great, great interest in the U.S. right now,
but I thought it would be interesting to get a perspective from
another country as well, especially since you seem to have
devoted your life to learning about this. So I think there are
going to be some lessons that are transferable, but let's just
start maybe with how you came to this subject of your PhD and of
your professional work.


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, sure. So I was really lucky. I got the chance to visit a
lot of communities that were doing renewable energy projects, and
these were communities that were really embracing renewables.
They loved renewables and they were getting great outcomes for
their communities and for the planet. And I wanted to see more of
that. I wanted to see more communities who were really passionate
about renewables and able to get a lot of great benefits from
being involved in the energy transition. And I wanted to see more
communities who felt positive about this change. And if we go
back, I first got involved in this in the early two thousands.


And at that time, there were a lot of communities who were
pushing for more renewable energy uptake. And in Australia at
that time, there really wasn't a ton of renewable energy, and
probably similar in the states, communities were really wanting
to get behind renewable energy as a means of taking action on
climate change. And at that time, there was an absence of
national policy supporting renewables. So it was about a
grassroots movement to get renewables up and running. So we saw
programs like communities coming together to organize a bulk
purchase and install of solar panels at a community scale.


So helping reduce the barriers for people, helping them
understand the technology, helping them install it in their
homes. But we also saw communities coming together to establish
commercial-scale projects like little two-turbine wind farms. And
this was really motivated by communities wanting to take positive
action on climate change.


David Roberts


Did that switch at some point to resistance? Because that's the
opposite of the problem we have now.


Right, well, I guess, yeah. So what we're seeing now is there is
emerging resistance to large scale renewable energy projects. And
so it is, it's a really different landscape. But what I've
learned through my years of being involved is that it's really
possible for communities to not only accept renewable energy
projects but to really love them and to welcome them in their
communities. And it's about the way we go about these projects,
and it's about the way we make opportunities for people to really
be involved and to genuinely participate in that process.


What was the PhD work, what was the specific focus of your PhD?


Jarra Hicks


So, my PhD looked at small community-owned wind farms. So using
commercial-scale turbines, 900-megawatt turbines, 1 MW turbines,
but just one or two or three of them at a time. So these are
small wind farms that are owned by the community. And those
projects, they've emerged from a community desire to have their
own energy or to have clean energy to take action on climate
change. And these communities went through different processes to
set up these enterprises so that they could have community-owned
wind farms. And my PhD was really looking at what are the social
outcomes that can occur in a community when they go through this
process together.


And ultimately, what I was looking at is how can we do renewable
energy development in a way that brings people along and that
helps people to feel positive and confident and comfortable about
renewable energy, and that creates a business model that delivers
benefit back into communities as well. And through my career now,
I've been able to learn about what is it that helps to create a
positive relationship between communities and large scale
renewable energy projects and to translate some of those
learnings into the commercial large scale renewable energy
practice of development.


David Roberts


Social license, as they call it. Talk a little bit about how you
think about social license, just sort of in the abstract. What is
social license and why is it particularly so important for
renewables?


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, so it's a term that's used to describe the ongoing
relationship between a project, the project proponent, and the
local community or the society hosting that project. It's a
dynamic relationship. It's not a once-off license that you might
get for other aspects of project approval. It's not a once-off
stamp, and there it is. It's dynamic and ongoing. It's constant.
It's through the development process, it's through the operation
phase of the project. It's lifelong. And it's about creating and
maintaining a level of acceptance and approval for a project in
the community that is hosting that project.


And at its strongest, it's about actually embedding that project
into a place so well and so much that people can identify
positively with it. Like it can even become a symbol of that
place, or it can become a characteristic that people feel proud
of. But when it's missing, or if there is no social license to
operate, that's when we see broad-scale opposition and protests
that can hamstring a project or stall it for years or even
sometimes kill a project in the water.


David Roberts


Yeah, I want to spend a little bit of time on that, on the
negative side on bad process. Starting with just: Is it as big a
problem in Australia as it is in the US right now? Because in the
mean, I think I would rank it on top of the forces pushing back
against the spread of renewables right now. I would put community
opposition rank it number one. There are projects dying right and
left of this stuff. Is it that big a problem in Australia? Like,
is the Australian renewables community as gripped by this problem
as they are over here?


Jarra Hicks


It's definitely a big concern, and I would say it's becoming a
more difficult thing by the day in Australia. Part of what's
going on is that communities are getting sick of the relationship
with a company that is extractive. They're getting sick of that
scenario where a big company comes in and takes something in a
way that feels extractive, it doesn't feel fair, and it doesn't
provide a benefit, a genuine, lasting benefit in that community.
And it doesn't engage with people in a way that helps them to
feel like they're being treated with respect. I have a
three-year-old kid and if I just try telling him what's going on
and being like, "Right, we're leaving the house now. Come on." He
doesn't really like it. People don't really like just being told
what to do. People respond much more positively if you're like,
"Hey, it's going to be important for us to go and do this thing
soon. And we could ride the bike there or we could drive the car
there. And while we're there, we could do something fun for you
as well." taking the example of my three-year-old kid. The
renewable energy equivalent is about working with communities
through a process that feels fair and good. So it's about doing
your engagement well. It's about doing your engagement early
enough so that communities genuinely have a role to play in
designing a project that is going to be appropriate and well
received in that place.


It's about doing engagement in a way that allows people genuinely
to influence some outcomes of the project. And it's about doing
your engagement in a way that is appropriate for that community
too. Like, are they online literate or do they rely really on the
newspaper and the radio and face-to-face engagement? it's about
all those things. But it's also about delivering positive and
tangible benefits. So there's really two elements. It's about it
being done well in terms of the process and done well in terms of
local people's experience of the outcomes from that project. In
the academic research on this that's been done across the US,
Europe, and Australia, the language is around procedural fairness
and distributional justice.


David Roberts


Do you in Australia, as we do in the US, have an active and
well-funded political force pushing against you on this? In other
words, trying to sow confusion where you're trying to remove it,
trying to raise fears where you're trying to calm them, that kind
of thing. Is there something organized like that nationwide, or
is this spontaneous community pushback?


Jarra Hicks


There is both. I would say that there's definitely organized,
particularly anti-wind sentiment that has deep links politically
within conservative politics and that historically has been
proven to have links with the fossil fuel industry as well. And
that's been the case for over a decade with regards to the
anti-wind movement in Australia. So that is a really difficult
political context and they are often really good at doing
fear-based campaigning and also capturing the media, and it's a
real concern. Part of my way of thinking and strategy for how to
address that is if we can be doing our practice well as renewable
energy developers, if we can be engaging people well and with
respect, we've got good process and we've got good strategies for
delivering benefit locally, delivering local jobs and local
procurement and other benefits, and we're in those communities
having good relationships and good conversations, then that's the
only thing really that we can do to inoculate against that
fear-based and organized campaigning.


David Roberts


Another thing that comes up when I hear this, and I've talked to
some renewable energy developers about this and they feel caught
in a dilemma, I guess you would say, which is there's this
incredible need for speed and this incredible demand for what
they want to do from the sort of nation at large, but this
incredible pushback at the local level. So when they go fast they
run into problems, right? They're told if they go too fast they
run into problems. But the only alternative is going very slow.
And going slow A, costs more money and B, doesn't serve that
interest of speed that's built into the sort of climate targets
that the US has.


So how do you wrestle with this dilemma between process and
speed? When I hear more process, more engagement with the
community, especially on a bespoke — as you say, every community
is different, and if you really want to do this well, you're
going to do research beforehand, you're going to do polls or
surveys, you're going to have someone who's there on a full-time
basis. I mean I can imagine how to do it very well. All of that
to me sounds very slow. How do you think about the relationship
of quality, I guess, and speed when it comes to community
engagement?


Jarra Hicks


I have a bunch of thoughts on that. I think at a project level,
if you have dedicated engagement staff working alongside your
project development team and they are able to be on the ground
doing the good work in the community, like there every step of
the way with your project development team from when that project
is first conceived and you're first doing feasibility studies, I
don't think this needs to take any more time. In fact, the
experience that I have seen with projects in Australia is that it
can actually speed up the project development and approval
process. So doing good engagement and good benefit sharing.


You know, I've spoken to projects whose experience is that it has
sped up their approval process and that that's had a really
substantial dollar value for them because it's made it easier and
faster. And this one particular project I'm thinking of, there
had been no wind projects approved in that state for two years
because wind energy projects had become quite controversial and
political and they got their project approved really without a
hitch because they had done great engagement, good benefit
sharing, and also because it was a well-placed project, it was a
strategically placed project. So I think that good practice does
not need to slow you down. I guess the other points that I would
make, I think that a lot is to do with the practice of developers
on the ground in communities.


But the scale and the pace at which we need to do this transition
as whole countries and as a whole planet requires that we put
some emphasis on creating the right social context for this
transition so that our society and our communities really
understand why it's needed, they feel comfortable with the
technologies, but even more than that, they are enabled and
supported to participate themselves. So what I've seen with
community energy and what I really believe is that if we have
policies that support people to get involved with renewables in
their homes, in their businesses, in their communities, that
that's going to create a social context of support that will
assist us with getting large scale projects happening faster as
well.


David Roberts


I meant to mention as you went past that, that these community
engagement people at the renewable energy developers who I talk
to also always say that they're underfunded relative to their
opposition, that they go in completely unprepared for the scale
and intensity of opposition, and that their bosses don't yet
understand how important or significant their job is or how the
kind of fight they're fighting. Do you have a sense that
renewable energy developers are starting to get the significance
of this and resource it appropriately?


Jarra Hicks


I do feel like that's a change that's very much underway in
Australia, also globally, but there's a long way to go. I think
there's a recognition now that social license and the social
aspects of this energy change are really important. I think
people are starting to use the right words, but I think people
are still learning what that means in practice, particularly when
it does need to be quite nuanced and locally appropriate in
different contexts. But the things that I've seen helping to
shift that practice and that sort of emphasis and that resourcing
towards more community engagement in Australia, the things that
are helping, I think, are industry bodies who are helping people
do peer-to-peer learning, and policies that reward better
practice.


So, for example, in Australia, we have a range of merit-based
criteria that companies need to report against in order to be
able to access renewable energy incentives or to be able to have
grid access to new transmission lines. So that puts like
weighting criteria around social outcomes and around community
engagement practice, benefit sharing, local procurement, all of
those things. Increasingly as well, in the private power purchase
agreement market, we're seeing criteria around those social
aspects included as well, like say a university who wants to sign
a direct power purchase agreement. They want to know that the
community has been happy with that project and it's delivering
some good social outcomes as well as has good environmental
credentials as well.


That's also like a market thing that's helping change behavior.


David Roberts


A little demand pull there.


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, so I think those things are helping. One gap that my
organization has helped to address as well is like writing a
bunch of guides and guidelines, working with policymakers to
write those guidelines, doing research to inform those
guidelines. But also we have set up a professional development
course that is targeted specifically to renewable energy
developers and training them up in community engagement and
benefit sharing practice.


David Roberts


Yeah, I was going to say, what do you do if you're a developer? I
mean, if you got into renewable energy to do renewable energy,
this is not necessarily something you understand or have any
strength in or — besides the guides are your guides the only
guides you're aware of in terms of just like off the shelf help?
Because I know a lot of developers are looking for help now, but
it's hard to standardize, as you say, it's hard to standardize
this stuff.


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, well, I think the industry bodies play a role there. So in
Australia, it's the Clean Energy Council. They have written
guides, we've written guides with them. They've also funded
research that's helped us to understand better what type of
practice is creating better social outcomes. And that's a piece
of research that we did a few years ago. I think it is difficult
because the energy industry is dominated by engineers and
technical people for sure, but we need to increase the awareness
that people with a community development training, community
engagement training, even social work, those types of skill sets
can be brought in and skilled up enough into the renewable
development process that they can help on those social aspects of
developing a project.


David Roberts


So talk just a little bit about what a good process looks like
because it seems like it would be easy, when you're talking about
community benefits, it seems how it would be easy for this to
look like you're just coming into a community and saying, "if you
let us build this, we'll buy you a bridge." Just sort of like
very transactional. So what does good community engagement look
like? And what are the sorts of things that you can offer a
community that don't just look like you're trying to pay them
off?


Jarra Hicks


Yeah. So the key there is that it needs to be relational. So good
engagement is all about forming good relationships locally. That
starts with your host landowners, and it broadens out to the
neighbors and then the near community and then the broader
community around a project site. It's about spending as much time
as possible face to face, and even if that needs to be online,
but ideally in person, face to face, having direct conversations,
having some of those conversations one on one, having some of
them in group environments, and building that up over time,
sustaining your engagement and offering a range of different ways
that people can engage with the project.


So, don't just do one focus group. Think about doing a few focus
groups in a few different areas. Think about having an online
survey. Think about having a stall in the street where people can
have casual conversations with you and fill out a physical
survey. Think about pairing your online comms with a letter mail
out. So one of the keys, I think, is sustaining the comms and
engagement over time and through a diversity of methods, but
starting that conversation with the community early enough so
that the input can inform the project as it develops. Like, I
understand a lot of stuff is commercial decisions, but there are
going to be things that actually will be useful if you
incorporate local knowledge.


And those are things like really obvious places in the landscape
that are special to people or that have First Nations heritage
and significance. If you can access local knowledge early on to
know where those are, your project is going to be better off.
You're going to avoid the costs of maybe making a mistake in
terms of sighting. There's going to be micro sighting decisions
that you can include local people in. Like you might reach out to
local biodiversity or land care groups to help you understand the
nuances of local riparian zones or connectivity among different
areas of different vegetation types locally.


These are pretty niche local knowledge — things that can really
help if you reach out to local groups. And I would say every
single point of connection you can make with a local person and a
local organization builds up a richer, stronger network of
relationships between the project and the community. And that,
that gives you more resilience, I think, against the challenges
when they emerge. People know who to come to if they're hearing
whispers about something that doesn't sound quite right. All of
those things help over time. And in terms of benefit sharing, I
think the key really is that it's paired with good engagement and
that that conversation starts early.


So when you're first speaking to the neighbors and you're first
speaking to local groups, you're saying, "Hey, we don't know
exactly what it's going to look like yet, but we are going to
offer a per megawatt amount to a community fund. And the amount
we can offer will vary based on the commercial aspects and the
generation profile of this project. But where that money goes and
how it contributes to the community, we want that to be a
decision we make with the community. And so we're going to be
setting up a local reference group, we're going to be talking to
people, and we're going to be working with you to design that
benefit sharing package and then to govern it and make the
decisions about where that money goes over time."


So, it's really about creating opportunities for people to be
involved, to participate. Fundamentally, I think that's it.


David Roberts


What do communities tend to ask for when they are allowed to be
involved? Are there patterns? Are there predictable things that
work?


Jarra Hicks


A lot of projects end up setting up some kind of grant fund, like
an annual grant fund, because it is really flexible and it can be
really responsive to whatever it is that the community is wanting
to do, or whatever the need is at the time. But I've also seen
really great programs like allocating a portion of the benefit
fund into a revolving loan program that can support low-income
households to install solar panels or solar hot water or heat
pumps, and that money is brought back and then recycled over time
and can go on to help the next household. I've also seen programs
where a portion is allocated to an annual grant fund and a
portion is allocated to a sort of longer-term legacy fund where
it might go into an interest-earning account for a few years, and
then after five or so years, it's got a bigger chunk of money to
do a bigger strategic project in the community, and to go out and
seek matching funding from state government or whatever it is, so
that the community can achieve something that is a bigger, more
strategic need, that has a longer-lasting impact. So I think
really it's about being able to work with a community to identify
what are the things that are going to have a significant impact
on the challenges that are being faced by that community, that
are unique to that place, that will really help to create a step
change.


You know, for a lot of small regional communities renewable
energy is a really unique opportunity that comes once in multiple
generations. And if we can use this opportunity well, we can
deliver some really awesome outcomes. And some of the great
examples I've seen are renewable energy developers partnering
with domestic violence organizations to be able to repurpose
worker accommodation into temporary accommodation for people
experiencing domestic violence. So after the project has been
built, that accommodation is then able to be gifted or co-owned
by a local service and a local government to be able to have an
ongoing positive benefit in a community.


David Roberts


And these are all just things that developers are coming up with.
Communities —


Jarra Hicks


No, well, in conversation with the community. It takes being on
the ground, having conversations, going through a process that is
basically like a community development process or a community
planning process, thinking about having local conversations with
people, thinking about what are the real needs here and what
could we do and who could we work with to make a great impact.


David Roberts


This also brings me to something that I was glad to see that you
are working on and writing about, which is it seems there are
going to be places where these projects are concentrated and
there's going to be a bunch of projects in particular regions.
And it just seems like developers going one by one by one by one
by one to each of these little communities and working out
bespoke deals — it seems like you could do something more
regional, more regional in impact, something a little bit more
with a little bit more structure and something that could pool
the benefits of multiple projects and maybe do bigger things for
public benefit, things that you couldn't do with the revenue from
a single project. And you've been writing a little bit about
that.


So just describe what regional benefit sharing, what that means.


Jarra Hicks


Sure. So it's exactly that. It's in areas where there's going to
be a high density of projects: How can we coordinate benefits,
but how can we also coordinate other things that are going to
have a significant impact but also a significant possible
positive benefit for communities like coordinating housing,
coordinating jobs and training, coordinating employment
opportunities and local procurement opportunities? But in terms
of the benefits, it's about saying, "yeah, how can we work
together?" first of all, to administer our programs so that we
don't overwhelm the community and confuse everyone and create
engagement fatigue.


David Roberts


Yeah, I mean, you can imagine communities like, "What did you
get? Well, what did you get?" And just all the rumors going back
and forth. There's just a lot of process happening over and over
and over again.


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, and totally. And if there's ten different grant funds all
in the same area, how do you remember which one are we applying
for now? And all the time that goes into those applications? So
there's a way of streamlining the administration of the benefit
sharing and streamlining the governance as well. So if you've got
a local committee involved in helping to make the decisions about
what gets funded, being able to have one committee that might
oversee a number of different grant programs that are all in the
same geographic region, that makes a ton of sense, being able to
have some common resourcing of the administration.


So rather than having one staff person in every company, you pool
that and you do it together. That makes sense. It makes it easier
for the community, probably. It also makes it less cost for the
company. But then there's also a whole other level is like, how
do we pool some of that funding at a regional scale to do
something strategic, bigger, with more lasting impact on the real
issues? So with benefit sharing, there needs to be layers, right?
Benefit sharing is partly about creating a positive relationship
and an experience that is of fairness from a project.


And so that does need to relate to the community that is most
immediately affected by that project. So you need to make sure
that your benefits are experienced by the neighbors and by the
immediate community who are hosting the project. If it was all
going to the region, that probably wouldn't feel fair for the
people who are literally the ones who see it every day. So, a
portion of the benefit sharing from any project needs to stay in
that most immediate community. But I think a portion of the
benefit sharing budget, there's an opportunity to pool it with
other projects within that region so that you can have that
bigger fund and you can do those more strategic projects.


David Roberts


But who's doing that? Is that developers coordinating with one
another? Because that seems — I don't know how well that's going
to work. Is this like a nonprofit entity? Is this a government, a
regional governmental thing? How would you structure this so that
it feels fair to all the individual communities involved and to
all the individual developers involved?


Jarra Hicks


I think that's a great question, and to my knowledge, we're still
very much figuring that out the world over. I'm not aware of
examples of where this has actually been done yet.


David Roberts


Oh, really?


Jarra Hicks


I am aware of foundations, like existing foundations that are
providing some administrative and governance services to
developers around their benefit sharing programs. But I'm not
aware of anybody who is regionally coordinating a bunch of
projects to do something more strategic. And that's the work that
we are thinking through right now. And we're basically out there
seeking partnerships with other people who want to figure that
out with us. But I imagine we're going to see a bunch of
different models. And I think this is partly the role of the
state. When we talk about needing to coordinate renewable energy
development so that we can keep the lights on and meet our
climate targets and our net zero emissions targets, there is a
role for the state to coordinate that process, and this is part
of that coordination that needs to happen.


It is not just a technical change. It's also a social process. We
need the state. In Australia, this is definitely the case. I can
understand why it's happened, but we've been mostly focused on
the technical and the market aspects of setting up this renewable
energy transition, rather than resourcing and trying to
coordinate or putting as much emphasis onto the social aspects.
Within that, I include the impacts on housing, the need for
additional training and jobs, and workforce development. There
are just so many layers to it.


David Roberts


This is what I always come back to as I think about these things:
I can imagine things developers can do individually and in
individual communities, and even some regional sharing if they
can figure out models to do it. But I just keep coming back to
the role of the state. It would just be so much easier, I mean,
if there were a sort of prescribed minimum of here's how much you
have to share with the community you're located in, or something
like that. Just some baselines, just so people aren't tempted to
cheat, because every developer now has to be thinking like, how
can I get around this?


You need everyone's cooperation to sort of lift the boat. And it
would just be easier if there were some force of law behind it,
don't you think?


Jarra Hicks


Yeah. So there are definitely some really strong guidelines that
have emerged in Australia now and some really strong norms that
are emerging, and some of that is through state governments
issuing guidelines, and some of it is through the merit-based
criteria for being able to access transmission lines or access
renewable energy incentives. Part of it also is just like
industry norms that are emerging and communities also knowing
about those and holding developers to account on them. The norms
that are emerging in Australia are like a per megawatt
contribution that is standard for a wind farm, and per megawatt
contribution that's standard for a solar farm.


It's emerging now like it was still figuring it out, but emerging
in terms of transmission and batteries as well. I think it's
great that there's a norm around that dollar figure. It's also
great that it isn't regulated, that it has to be spent in certain
ways, because I'm a strong believer in the need for that to be a
conversation that is led by the local community and needs to be
adaptable to the local context.


David Roberts


Has anybody figured out what I have always thought just
instinctively would be the best tool for social license: Which
is, once you've been doing this a while and you have some happy
communities who have your renewable energy in them and are
benefiting from it and are happy that they did it. Why don't you
get them to talk to the next community? Do you know what I mean?
Like all of this, so much of this, is outsiders coming in. But if
I'm in a regional community and someone else from a nearby
regional community is talking to me, it seems like you just cut
through so many layers of skepticism and doubt with that.


Is that a big piece of the puzzle?


Jarra Hicks


I think it totally is. I think people are always more receptive
to a message when they hear it from someone that they trust and
someone they can relate to. That has been a tactic that's been
used in Australia, like taking people on bus trips to go and
visit an existing wind or solar farm and talk to the farmer who
owns that land, talk to them about their experience of that
project. There's also nothing better than actually experiencing
something for yourself. If you've heard a bunch of really quite
crazy claims about what a wind turbine can do, if you're able
just to go and experience it yourself, you can probably make up
your own mind about whether or not those things are true or not.


But I also think this points to the really important role for
advocacy organizations and not-for-profit organizations. Our
organization is a not-for-profit that works in this space. And
there are a number of other great not-for-profits that work
across Australia. It's just important to remember that we need to
resource those types of organizations who do help to fill the
gaps and who do help to do that kind of positive advocacy. I
think there's an onus on philanthropy and governments and
developers all to support those kinds of organizations and their
role within this ecosystem that is going to help us achieve the
transition.


David Roberts


One of the things that emerges from reading your discussion
papers especially, is if you want to do this right, such that you
get both a positive community experience and you get scale and
speed: You need a bunch of different groups of people working
together who haven't always necessarily including like local
governments, nonprofits, developers, maybe whatever. These
possible regional organizations are just a lot of different
jurisdictions and levels of things to work together. Do you feel
like from the 30,000-foot perspective, things are moving in the
right direction in Australia? Are people coming together around a
model that is actually going to scale and go quickly?


Do you feel optimistic about that?


Jarra Hicks


I feel quite mixed about it. I think there's some really great
stuff happening and I think there's some good examples of that
starting to happen more and more, but there's also some really
concerning trends. And part of me feels like it's probably going
to get a little bit more messy before we really figure it out. I
think that's often the way that change happens, and maybe to some
extent that's okay. But I do think I am seeing more
collaborations and more partnerships and more conversation
between all those different parties trying to figure it out. For
me, what I think would really help to unlock the pace and the
fairness and the speed of our transition to clean energy is if we
really unlock the ability for everybody to play their role in it.


In Australia, we've had households keen to get behind solar for a
really long time. We've now got 3.3 million solar roofs in our
country that account for gigawatts of generation.


David Roberts


Yeah, and that's just an incredible amount of personal experience
with solar power too, just at a base level.


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, and we've got a bunch of community energy projects as well,
and we've got even more that want to get up and running, but
there haven't been consistent efforts to enable and support that
scale of action. I think one of the big missing pieces for me in
this is really thinking about how we can enable small and medium
scale projects to tap into the distribution network. We know we
need massive transmission upgrades, but they are pretty hard and
they take a long time and they're expensive. How can we optimize
the distribution network, and how can we support communities to
do mid-scale projects in that distribution network as part of our
big picture thinking towards this?


Because that's going to get more people involved, more people
active and understanding more people behind the transition. I
heard a story just yesterday of a guy who's a dairy farmer in an
area where it's called a renewable energy zone, which is the
state government's way of coordinating a high density of large
scale projects and planning new transmission lines into a region
so that it can accommodate lots of large scale projects. So while
the government and industry are planning big transmission lines
and big projects and asking that local community to host those
projects, this local dairy farmer is still on a really weak part
of the distribution network. So much so that he cannot rely on
the grid to supply his electricity, to be able to milk his cows.


So, he has two diesel generators to be able to meet that need. I
think these are the types of discrepancies we need to address
because they lead to major community frustration. Instead, we
need to be finding ways to enable people to participate. We
should not be in a situation where somebody is being asked to
host large-scale generation without also themselves being enabled
to get involved with the renewable energy transformation.


David Roberts


Yes, well said. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your
experience. And thank you also, I know I mentioned this up at the
top, but I'll just mention it again that you and your
organization have written a guide to social license for
developers and others. Just people to think through how it works
and some steps in how to do it well and some best practices and
some examples which I think would be great if someone could do
that over here too. But I think it would be valuable for everyone
to look at it.


So thank you for doing that as well. And thank you for taking the
time.


Jarra Hicks


Yeah, no worries at all. I'll just mention as well that I
mentioned that socially responsible renewable energy professional
development course that we run. It's an online course and we're
in the process of redeveloping it. So, it could be an online,
self-paced course that could be accessible for people no matter
where they are in the world. So you can go onto our website, sign
up for our updates if you're interested in that course. I'm sure
a lot of that content would be relevant no matter where you are.


David Roberts


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