When Stephen McCarron, chair of the Auchinleck community council, brought together nine community councils to discuss a plan to take control of local wind farm money, it was like, he recalled, dealing with “nine kittens in a sack”.

Five years later, those kittens have worked together to pull in ground-breaking forms of funding, and are now channelling that money into projects that matter locally. From salaries for jobs, like an activities assistant, to a new bowling club roof, the 70 projects funded show how community benefit can be targeted through a new funding model in which locals take control.

What this group of councils in the Cumnock and Doon Valley, the 9CCG, have succeeded in creating, said Mr McCarron, is a “coordinated and collaborative” model, which draws in and disseminates the community benefit arising from wind farms being developed in their surrounding area.

It’s a model that Mr McCarron believes should be rolled out throughout Scotland, and could be “gamechanging” for many communities. Already the council chair has been invited to numerous groups and community councils in North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire and Perthshire, to talk about how it works, and what others can take from their “a la carte” approach.

Auchinleck, Patna, Ochiltree & Skares, New Cumnock, Netherthird, Cronberry, Logan & Lugar, Drongan, Rankinson & Stair, Dalmellington and Cumnock. These are the names of the nine community councils that are coming together as the 9CCG trust to ensure that wind farm money funds the local projects that matter to them.

Their homes are the former coalfield communities of East Ayrshire, towns and villages that have seen the devastation of deindustrialisation. Not far from McCarron’s home in Auchinleck, is the dramatic capital letter form of the Barony A-Frame, 55 metres high, a symbol of a past industrial culture that that has marked the area.

McCarron believes that while wind energy will never have the same cultural place or resonance in the area as coal, which employed so many and was so much part of the fabric of local life, the money wind power brings can help provide some rejuvenation.

The new funding model, he noted, is also changing local attitudes to wind farms. The area is still home to critics, but it is becoming more “wind farm friendly”.

“I always found it peculiar,” he observed, “that these cohorts of anti-wind-farm campaigners, were often made up of individuals who reminisced fondly about the mines and the industry of the coal mining, without paying cognisance to some of the environmetal devastation it caused.”

The idea for community collaboration started to develop when, as chair of Auchinleck community council, Mr McCarron had noticed, within a short period of time, the number of opportunities for funding that might arise because “of a mass of planning applications for wind developments”.

Too often, he observed, such community benefits “either went to local authorities or were directed at one particular community at the expense of others”.

That’s why, when Brockwell Energy, developer of the North Kyle wind farm approached him, as the Auchinleck chair, with a plan for community benefit that he said would be transformational, he replied. “‘Hold on. We have had enough people parachuted in here telling us how to spend our money.”

Instead, what McCarron proposed, was that he could get the communities within the geographical terrain of the wind farm to partner up. The idea was that, rather than the funding going to the local council’s Renewable Energy Fund, as it would often do, the communities should take control and handle it themselves.

But getting nine community councils, each with their own strong identities, to work together was not initially an easy task. There was, he said, plenty of tribalism within the area. “There were, as in many places, grievances between parts of the community with the Cumnock Valley and to some extent there still is, though not as much.”

“A lot of that was embedded in village rivalry; the rivalry, for instance, of village football. Auchinleck versus Cumnock. New Cumnock versus Cumnock. These are the communities that are now all within the 9CCG and have taken that step change, crossed that rubicon in order to work collaboratively and to make sure that opportunities are coordinated. “

The first time the nine met, there was so little agreement, he recalled, that the meeting had to be abandoned after twelve minutes. “The nine tribes came together and all the old parochial feelings of this community versus that community came out, along with a couple of green shoots of people realising the benefits of working together.”

Mr McCarron went back to one of the developers and was given an ultimatum that if the community councils couldn’t work together, the money would just go to the local authority.

“We decided,” he said, "to have a go of the second meeting, once the idea was in people’s minds and everyone was aware of the offer might be taken away from us, we managed to start making agreements.”

The result has been not just a more local, democratic control of funding, but that Brockwell Energy released a £628,000 instalment ahead of the North Kyle windfarm site in East Ayrshire starting operation. This was the first time such advance release of funding had happened Scotland. It also followed £200,000 given to help the 9CCG with set up costs.

This initial funding, which exceeded statutory obligations, was in addition to £1,102,000 per annum based on the standard £5,000 per annum per MW which will commence when the scheme is fully commissioned, generating around £60 million over its 35-year operating life.

(Image: Gordon Terris/Herald and Times) Stephen McCarron at the Barony A-Frame

“This," said Mr McCarron, "is a collaborative approach about maximising this chance and making the most of this opportunity. This is the pooling and sharing of resources to make sure that for future generations there’s sustainability and economic and environmental legacy at the heart of the opportunity with this ‘windfall’ of community benefit."

Iain Cockburn, CFO of Brockwell Energy, said: “In the past some developers, including ourselves, chose to lead consultation processes themselves resulting in funding decisions being made in isolation and without any overall coordination with other developers and without considering the overall long term funding position available to the communities.

“As more schemes are commissioned this practice would lead to more and more developers running their own consultation processes in parallel without any coordination or overall planning or control. The result would clearly be confusion and sub-optimal decision making.

North Kyle is not the only windfarm, and Brockwell not the only company, that the community councils are working with. There is also benefit being sourced from REG Windpower (Knockkippen), OnPath Energy (Lethans) and Invenergy (Pencloe).

With onshore wind targeted to more than double from the current 9.4GW currently installed in Scotland to 20GW in 2030, how to maximise community benefit to transform communities is set to be still more pertinent over the coming years. A paper published by Biggar Economics in 2023 stated: "Over the next 35 years the total value of community benefit funding across the South of Scotland could amount to nearly £900 million, nearly 30 times as much as has been generated to 2023."

READ MORE:

Community benefit also stands to increase from other net zero projects, from rewilding to, potentially, offshore wind.A Fair Energy Deal for Scottish Communities, published in February this year, called for various measures including mandatory reporting by developers on community benefits and the updating of good practice principles.

Mr McCarron said: “The hills around our communities are ideal for hosting a large cluster of wind schemes that are not only of significant national importance in achieving climate change goals but will generate community benefit that will exceed £150 million over the next 40 years.

“These schemes do have a local impact so it is imperative that those communities work together to maximise the benefit that they can secure from these schemes to compensate.”