Expression of Interest Form
To be a member of the community advisory board, you need to live within or close to the priority north west REZ.
Overview
Community Benefit Sharing has been an important focus of our consultation to date. We have sought feedback through Stakeholder Reference Groups (SRG) and industry. We also sought feedback on the proposed CBS process to develop a CBS framework for REZ.
Key points:
CBS aims to integrate a renewables project into the local community by contributing to its future vitality and success.
CBS schemes have historically been largely implemented for renewable energy generation projects, but there is a growing expectation that transmission projects and battery/storage projects will also need their own CBS.
We have heard that north west communities and councils are seeking coordinated CBS outcomes from hosting multiple renewable projects. We have also heard that communities are feeling engagement fatigue, as project-by-project engagement imposes heavy burdens on the same communities.
As we see more projects moving into the north west region, there is an opportunity to coordinate benefits from multiple individual developers to create a regional CBS scheme. This could:
We don’t know yet. We have heard from our Stakeholder Reference Group that the framework should have the ability to coordinate all levels of benefit sharing (i.e. project and regional levels). In this framework, we are proposing that a large percentage of developer funds are pooled in a regional fund that is then administered to deliver broader community outcomes, with the developer left to deliver the remaining funds on a project level (i.e. to those directly impacted by a project).
Alongside public input, the co-design of the regional CBS framework will be led by a newly established community advisory board in the north west.
The role of the group will be to:
To be a member of the community advisory board, you need to live within or close to the priority north west REZ.