Wind for the Future

Project Overview

Wind for the Future is a community-owned generation project developed with the Innovation Lab: four turbines, financed by the households they supply, feeding a New York distribution network that had spare capacity nobody had costed.

The engineering was the straightforward part. The two years before construction went on the share offer, the grid connection agreement and the planning consent — in that order of difficulty, and not the order anyone expected.

Community Ownership

1,340 households hold shares, with a cap on individual holdings that keeps control local. Surplus revenue funds a community energy-efficiency scheme, which has so far insulated just over two hundred homes in the same postcodes.

Siting and consent

Three candidate sites were assessed publicly, with noise and shadow-flicker modelling published in full before any application was made. Objections at the eventual hearing ran at a fraction of the regional average, which we attribute almost entirely to that sequencing.

Grid connection

The project connects at distribution rather than transmission voltage, which limited its size but removed four years from the connection queue. For a community-financed scheme, certainty of timing was worth more than megawatts.

Results

The turbines generate enough to cover the annual consumption of roughly 3,100 homes, and the scheme has returned a distribution to shareholders in each year of operation.