Time kills returns. Weak projects kill portfolios. Across Ireland and beyond, more than half of wind projects never reach operation – eroding pipeline value, undermining investor confidence, and reducing the number of projects that generate power and cash flow. The issue isn’t engineering or finance. It’s host community support – the fourth essential project pillar alongside technical, financial, and legal.
Key takeaways
-
The risk: Most wind projects don’t fail due to engineering or finance – they stall on social feasibility: the equivalent of technical feasibility, but for trust, legitimacy, and fit with place and people.
-
The required innovation: Collaborative design is not a “nice to have”. It’s a risk-management and value-creation process that’s essential when dealing with shared space.
-
The framework: Grounded in peer-reviewed research and tested in practice, the Renewables AT PACE framework – developed through ELSA in collaboration with many organisations in Ireland and overseas – combines best practice and proven experience to give developers and host communities a practical way to work together from day one.
-
The financial logic: A modest early investment in partnership-building and co-design costs far less than a few months of project delay. It also makes early-stage investments more secure, and increases the number of successful projects in an investor’s portfolio.
So how did we arrive at these conclusions?
Working with developers and host communities shows a consistent pattern, including:
1) The uncomfortable truth: even great projects can stall
Developers do the hard work – resource assessment, grid studies, land access, finance, preparing the path through environmental and legislative approvals. Yet their projects still hit headwinds – not because turbines can’t generate or capital isn’t available, but because many within the host community feel the project is being done to them, not with them.
What does this mean?
It doesn’t mean communities are anti-renewables or against progress. In fact, most support the energy transition. But when people feel excluded from shaping decisions that directly affect their homes, livelihoods, and landscapes, resistance becomes almost inevitable (See ELSA’s video series “Bridging the Gap” for a deeper dive in this).
Objection is not a rejection of clean energy – it’s a demand for fair process, legitimacy, and respect. Respect not only for people’s concerns and aspirations, but also for the hard work already done within a community to build its identity, sustain local livelihoods, and care for its environment.
What looks like “objection” is usually a signal about three fundamentals:
-
Legitimacy: “Who decided this, and how – and why?”
-
Fit: “Does this strengthen or weaken our community and its development?”
-
Trust: “Will they listen and adapt when problems arise?”
If those questions aren’t addressed early and credibly, local conversations turn adversarial, timelines stretch, costs escalate, and the community gets divided. Everyone loses: the developer, the community, and national climate targets. The only way to reverse this pattern is to address these fundamentals from the very start.
2) The hidden cost of delay (and why the maths favour collaboration)
For the developer, every month of impasse carries direct costs (redesigns, consultants, legal fees), and much larger opportunity costs (lost generation revenue, lost investor confidence, missed policy windows, reduced resale profit).
Illustrative economics for 50 MW of onshore wind energy for an asset developer and operator:
-
Capacity factor: 35%
-
Annual generation: 50 MW × 0.35 × 8,760 h ≈ 153,300 MWh
-
Wholesale price (illustrative): €60–€90/MWh
-
Annual revenue foregone by a one-year delay: ≈ €9.2m–€13.8m
Even a modest early investment in structured, systematic partnership-building for collaborative design is a rounding error against the cost of a single year’s delay.
The exact figures will vary with market conditions, PPAs, and curtailment. But the order of magnitude is clear: time kills returns. Lost time and resources to appeals or redesign erodes millions in value across project pipelines. Addressing this, ELSA's Renewables AT PACE collaborative project development framework increases the conversion rate of projects from concept to consent – a metric every board and cabinet understands. And for investors, across - say - a 150-project pipeline, even a 10% improvement in consent-rate or time-to-permit can shift IRR by several basis points and unlock hundreds of millions in enterprise value.
Renewables AT PACE is not a new cost line – it’s a multiplier on conversion rate from concept to consent, the metric that ultimately defines fund performance.
But what if you are a developer focusing on early stage development with a business plan to sell ready-to-build (RTB) projects?
In this case, your key focus may not be delayed revenue but rather development premium. Which means:
-
Every month of drift adds costs (consultants, planning, grid deposits, operations).
-
Uncertainty reduces investors' confidence in your deliverability.
-
Higher attrition across your pipeline thins returns across the portfolio: higher failure rate removes profit.
Put simply: whether your business model is ‘hold-to-operate’ or ‘develop-to-sell’, AT PACE reduces your portfolio’s risk exposure: more projects predictably reach completion, your reputation to produce responsible projects strengthens buyer/investor confidence, and projects doomed to fail are removed in a timely fashion to no longer diminish your portfolio’s returns.
What about landowner-first reality - and its social cost if not managed?
Developers almost always have to start with landowners – securing site access and control being an essential foundation for any project. With competitive pressures and risks such as “blackmail strips,” completing this step first is a business necessity, not a choice. But it creates an immediate perception gap: when communities hear of a project, they often assume it’s a “done deal” – and worse, that they can no longer trust their neighbours.
AT PACE doesn’t dismiss that constraint; it helps developers manage it. Research through the ELSA RDD programme showed that many projects unintentionally carry forward dynamics established in this early phase – secrecy, assumption-making, and defensive communication – which carries their project towards opposition. This is avoidable. Communities are open to credible, timely explanations of why land agreements must come first, provided they see transparency, respect, and fair intent. What they are not open to is the kind of local value destruction and community division that secrecy and late engagement can create.
The AT (Anchor + Transition) stages of AT PACE give developers a structured way to work out a credible way to explain their approach, and demonstrate legitimacy before plans advance.
Bottom line: The question is not whether collaboration costs more or is ‘pie-in-the-sky’ when faced with some realities – the answer to these become pretty clear during the first A of AT PACE – but whether you can afford the inefficiency of sticking with Decide–Announce–Defend. Time – and mounting early stage costs – kills returns. And weak projects kill portfolios. Across large project pipelines, even a 10% reduction in attrition can translate into hundreds of millions in preserved development premium or operational yield.
And yet, most industry project development models still treat this risk as an externality rather than a design factor – creating systemic inefficiency.
3) Why traditional approaches fail
The renewables industry is increasingly using shared space – land and seascapes where people already live, work, and sustain local economies. This demands an innovative approach to project development. Yet many projects still follow the old DAD pattern: Decide – Announce – Defend.
-
Under DAD, plans are substantially formed before communities even see them.
-
“Engagement” is treated as a requirement to be discharged, rather than a process for partnership-building, or as input into the project’s design brief.
-
Communities, seeing their concerns unacknowledged, become more fearful of real or perceived risks – and they push back.
Addressing this isn’t about giving anyone a veto. It’s about recognising that host-community fit is as real and essential as technical fit. Ignore it and you build fragility into your project from day one.
4) The business case for collaboration
Collaboration is not about slowing things down. It is about creating robust projects that can withstand scrutiny and build enough resilient support to deliver permits. From a business perspective, collaboration is both defensive and offensive – it reduces risks and creates shared value.
Risk management benefits
-
Faster consents: fewer surprises → fewer objections → fewer appeals.
-
Lower cost volatility: less rework, fewer last-minute delays or “sweeteners.”
-
Smoother permitting, construction & operations: issues are aired and resolved in partnership, not in DAD stand-offs, nor in the press.
Value creation benefits
-
Better integration with local needs: local knowledge avoids costly mistakes and reveals synergies with community development needs. Win-wins become possible.
-
Stronger licence to operate: trust enables permits, and then compounds and pays back over the investment’s life. It spills into future investments by ways of reputation.
-
Investor & ESG credibility: a robust process with measurable outcomes.
-
Portfolio advantage: boards and lenders reduce risk premiums when they see a repeatable, successful discipline that earns local support.
-
Reduced attrition: more projects actually reach success (developing three projects and getting paid for one is a vastly inferior business model to developing three and getting paid for two).
-
Competitive advantage and reputation that open doors to new sites.
Bottom line: Investing a fraction of project budget into a structured collaboration business model early typically saves millions later, and much lower project attrition in the shorter term – delivering orders-of-magnitude better ROI on the initial investment.
5) What collaboration looks like in practice (it’s structured, not vague)
“Work with the community” can sound soft. But, through Renewables AT PACE, it’s disciplined, time-bound, and built around steps:
-
Anchor – Get your own house in order
Clarify purpose, standards, and what “responsible project design” means. Align the board, project team, and contractors on what collaborative design is and why it matters, and what success must look like beyond megawatts and permits. -
Transition – Build capability to show up well
Equip the team for open dialogue. Map stakeholders via stakes rather than the usual suspects; become aware of both concerns and aspirations. -
Partner – Design the goals and engagement together
Agree ground rules, timelines, and decision boundaries. Bring in Trusted Intermediaries where needed to bridge gaps. -
Acknowledge – Face into the hard stuff
Put real constraints and local impacts on the table. Share each party’s non-negotiables honestly; invite alternatives where scope exists. -
Collaborate – Co-create the plan
Use structured workshops, visualisation, participatory assessments, and scenario trade-offs. Document and share how choices were made. -
Empower – Make it durable
Create a joint developer–host community project team for engagement, assessment, and promotion. Set up clear, ongoing channels that run through permitting, construction, and operations (including decommissioning / re-powering). Measure and report on mutual gains – not just compensation – alongside reduced risks and lessons learned.
Why AT PACE ≠ Community Engagement
Some might mistake AT PACE for a new way of doing community engagement. In reality, it turns “engagement” from a defensive, PR-driven, or tokenistic ritual into a design discipline that uses all the above steps to ensure your project is designed to win both investor and host-community support. It enables you to drop early the projects that will never cross the line, and focus on value creation with the projects that will. It builds your projects’ fourth feasibility pillar, alongside technical, financial, and legal.
Traditionally, community engagement is only one visible part of how developers interact with people – often arriving late, after most project decisions have already been made. It can inform, consult, or even listen well, yet still fail to build legitimacy because the real decisions stay elsewhere.
AT PACE is different. It embeds collaboration inside the project development process — not around it. It aligns how decisions are made, by whom, and to what standards of fairness and accountability. It makes the internal work (within the developer, the board, and their contractors) just as disciplined as the external dialogue with communities.
That’s why AT PACE isn’t a new version of engagement; it’s a new operating system for responsible project design.
6) A simple comparison (DAD vs. AT PACE)
The contrast is clear. Stick with DAD, and you inherit fragility. Move AT PACE, and you build resilience.
Timing of engagement → DAD: Late, after key decisions / AT PACE: Early, shaping options, aligning team
Community perception → DAD: “Done deal” → low legitimacy / AT PACE: "Invited partner” → higher legitimacy
Risk profile → DAD: High: appeals, redesigns, reputational damage / AT PACE: Lower: issues surfaced early, fewer surprises
Cost profile → DAD: Low upfront, high downstream; high project failure rate / AT PACE: Moderate upfront, lower downstream – effectively an insurance to protect investment, and optimise ROI
Outcome quality → DAD: Technically optimised, socially brittle / AT PACE: Technically sound and socially robust; more easily permitted and funded
7) “But won’t collaboration slow us down?”
Only if it’s unstructured or not fully embraced. In practice, structured early collaboration saves time:
-
It replaces serial surprises and conflict later with parallel problem-solving now.
-
It removes irreversible missteps that trigger appeals.
-
It creates a documented trail of good-faith effort – critical for planning, politics, and relationships with communities.
Think of it like commissioning: you don’t skip quality checks to “go faster.” You do them early so the system works when you switch on.
8) From downside risks to blue-sky opportunity
For boards and investors, the sums are simple:
-
Not going AT PACE: at least one year of delay ≈ €9–14 million lost revenue on a typical 50 MW onshore project for operation-focused developers, or for those creating RTB projects for sale – more premium-destroying projects in their portfolio
-
Going AT PACE: higher approval probability, smoother permitting, stronger licence to operate, and lower risk to upfront capital.
The investment is modest and manageable as it is incorporated into core business rather than structured as a ‘community engagement add-on’. It delivers a structured, time-bound collaboration programme with measurable outputs (stakeholder clarity, agreed ground rules, a design brief for the project that will guarantee its success, option and decision logs, community-impact management architecture / agreements).
This is CapEx and NPV protection. Given the reality on the ground, from today and beyond, ignoring social feasibility is as reckless as ignoring financial, technical, or legal due diligence.
9) How ELSA helps
Moving from DAD to collaborative project design does require some degree of internal change. The Earning Local Support Academy (ELSA) exists to make this doable for busy developer teams and host communities. We provide:
-
A repeatable framework (AT PACE) that sets expectations, roles, and boundaries.
-
Trusted Intermediary capability to bridge divides when relationships need it most.
-
Practical tools: structured dialogues, visualisation, “community & developer SWOTs,” option-trade-off logs, and a transparent record of decisions and benefits.
-
Capacity-building on both sides, so collaboration doesn’t depend on one facilitator or one individual.
-
A focus on mutual gains across the project life – not just (non-assessed) compensation through a community benefit fund.
Scalable by design:
AT PACE has been built for replication across projects – aligning project development and engagement standards, documentation, and decision trails so multi-site investors can track social-feasibility risk just as they track grid or finance milestones.
You don’t need to reinvent the social-feasibility wheel on every site. AT PACE gives your teams a disciplined, repeatable way to de-risk early and design with the people who live with the outcome.
10) Is AT PACE for every project?
No. Why change when what you are doing works for you?
And AT PACE is not a simple fix for failing projects either; though projects that have already lost community trust can still recover, but only if the developer is willing to go back to basics. This takes dedicated facilitation, time, and genuine innovation.
More broadly, AT PACE helps prevent that costly situation in the first place – it’s a disciplined method for designing success into projects from the start.
Experience shows there are two essential prerequisites – and one bonus factor – for AT PACE to work:
-
Board-level integration – AT PACE needs to be embedded in the business plan and governance of the project, not added later as an engagement tool. It succeeds when it has board-level sponsorship and when collaboration is seen as a core risk-management and value-creation strategy.
-
Internal readiness to reflect – The developer’s team must be willing to examine how its own actions or inactions may have contributed to community opposition or declining political support – and be prepared to fix those patterns.
-
(The bonus.) A senior champion who’s seen both sides – It helps immensely when someone in the leadership team has lived through projects where the old Decide–Announce–Defend model failed, and is determined not to repeat it.
AT PACE is not for organisations that want to “outsource engagement”, or to do it in a tokenistic way, or slightly better than the letter of the law. It is for those who want to get to the spirit of the law – those ready to show up well and treat collaboration as core to how projects are designed and delivered.
Closing: Renewables AT PACE is the smarter bet
Most projects don’t stumble on megawatts or money; they stumble on trust. Effective collaboration, done right, is the smarter financial bet: fewer surprises, faster progress, and projects that communities can live with – and even be proud of.
And let’s not forget the long game: if we do not embrace a project design method that delivers projects that communities can genuinely support, we will make it much harder for politicians, policymakers, planners, and investors to back further projects.
Projects that are technically strong, financially sound, and socially supported are the ones that sell, refinance, and repower successfully — and those are the portfolios that outperform over time.
In short, Renewables AT PACE converts social risk into financial resilience and turns local legitimacy into enterprise value.
Explore how Renewables AT PACE can turn social risk into a repeatable advantage for your projects. Talk to us at ELSA [at] AstonECO [dot] com and let’s map what collaboration would look like for your key sites.
