In the early days of windfarming, carpetbaggers almost ruined it for everyone.

Opportunists scoured regional Australia looking for prospective project sites. Farmers were pressured to sign up to leases and planning applications were rushed through. As soon as the permit was in hand, the developer would flip the project and start again.

In the worst cases, the surrounding communities were ignored. A lucky few windfarm hosts would do well. The local motel, restaurants and earthmoving business would do a roaring trade during construction and a number of good jobs would be created, but for poorly developed projects, the benefits stopped there.

Especially where the windfarm introduced significant new inequalities, long smouldering disagreements flared up and developers encountered opposition with, at times, shocking intensity. The few projects that got it very wrong gave a free kick to Australia’s small (but at times very vocal) anti-wind lobby and kicked off a series of unproductive federal Senate inquiries.

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Even though two-thirds of windfarms in Australia have never received any opposition, and Australia’s Wind Farm Commissioner hears precious few actual complaints, the sloppy work of some made life hard for all developers.

The better developers created community development funds and began entering into “neighbour agreements”, whereby non-turbine-hosting landowners in the immediate vicinity of the windfarm also received payments.

When the ACT developed its Renewable Energy Target, well aware that the turbines would be built in communities outside its borders, the scheme’s design dictated that community engagement and benefit sharing would account for 20% of the assessment weighting – price alone would not be enough to win.

The Sapphire Wind Farm, developed by CWP Renewables, was awarded a contract in March 2016 under the ACT scheme. Ten years in the planning, the $588m project will be NSW’s largest windfarm and is located between Inverell and Glen Innes in northern NSW. As part of the contract, CWP will invest more than $70m in an operations centre, research and training, all in Canberra, helping to make the capital a national hub for wind energy operations and research.

Technically it’s an impressive project – 75 Vestas V126 3.6MW turbines, the most powerful and tallest turbines in the country, each with a diameter of 126m (more than twice the wingspan of a Boeing 747), a hub height of 137m and a distance from ground to blade tip of 200m.

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But it’s the community engagement where Sapphire stands out. The project will be the first large windfarm in Australia to offer the opportunity of investment to community members.

The idea was introduced to CWP by Embark as a way of forming a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship between a community and a commercial wind farm. Embark, which grew out of the experience of Hepburn Wind, Australia’s first community owned windfarm, had seen first-hand that communities were keen to invest in their own infrastructure.

The model is simple. An investment vehicle is established, most likely an unlisted public company, and an investment offer is made to the community. If a critical threshold of funding is reached, the developer brings the community investment vehicle into the project as a funding partner. Financial returns are made to the community investment vehicle, a single manageable investor, which in turn makes distributions back to the investors. For the rest of the funding syndicate, the community looks like just another funder.

Community co-investment is not uncommon overseas. Italian developer Falck Renewables has built a number of windfarms in Britain using the model and it is now law in Denmark that every onshore wind farm must offer at least 20% of equity to those who live near the project. Some projects have allowed the community to name and paint a turbine and have provided “visitation rights” for community events.

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CWP Head of Development, Ed Mounsey, explains the company was “attracted to the concept as we’re always looking for innovative ways to differentiate from competition and lead the pack in community engagement”.

CWP contracted Taryn Lane, who cut her teeth at Hepburn Wind and Embark, and Adam Blakester, a local social entrepreneur from Starfish Initiatives, and gave them a challenge: prove the community was interested and that it could raise a minimum threshold of $3m in investment pledges.

After a series of information sessions and surveys in the New England area – from Tamworth to Glen Innes, Armidale to Moree – 337 people pledged to invest $5.4m, far exceeding expectations; 80% of those who made pledges lived locally and 96% committed less than $50,000.

Impressed with the interest, the project’s board this week agreed to proceed with the co-investment project. The team will now implement the structure and release a financial offer later this year. And it has reopened the pledge survey for a limited period in response to strong demand.

Local farmer Ben Swan is proud of the development, commenting that most visitors access the area through the Hunter Valley, passing huge coal pits on the way. The contrast of the Sapphire Wind Farm sets “a good example for the rest of the state”.

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Some communities are keen to build and own their own projects, but where a large project is coming to an area, community co-investment provides residents with simple and low-risk access to a project orders of magnitude larger.

The Sapphire Wind Farm is the first community co-investment project in Australia, and with community benefit part of assessment criteria for other schemes, including Victoria’s new target, we are likely to see the model replicated.

At current market prices, the ACT is set to subsidise the project less than $3 per megawatt-hour – a tiny premium for clean energy that brings so many other benefits to the ACT and the New England region.

With benefits flowing in both directions between the developer and the community, it’s no surprise this wind farm is welcomed within the local area.