Note: This is a Sunday discussion article. It is not the opinion of BPS Planning.
Irish solar farms are mostly approved and almost always opposed by someone. Australia has spent a decade learning that neighbours told a project is "good for the country" want to know what is in it for the townland. The evidence that sharing the proceeds wins people over is thinner than its advocates claim. The case for trying is still stronger than the case for hoping.
BPS Planning has worked on both sides of the fence, for those promoting schemes and for the communities and landowners living with them. This article does not draw on any project BPS Planning has worked on or is currently working on. It argues for the community side: local people who are asked to accept schemes that may affect their area, their property and their land values need to be given real reasons to say yes.
On 30 September, Galway County Council refused permission for a 239-hectare solar farm near the villages of Monivea and Abbeyknockmoy. The applicant, Heron Solar, had asked to operate for forty years. More than 350 submissions came in, and many objectors pointed to the size of the thing and its closeness to their houses. The council gave eleven reasons for refusing: the integrity of the Lough Corrib Special Area of Conservation, the road network under the grid-connection works, flood risk, and a glint-and-glare assessment it found wanting.
Reading such a list is like reading a very long, very polite "no". What it cannot contain is an answer to the question that planning law is not built to hear: what do we get? The application had been put together with agreements from several landowners, so some people in the parish had already been given a reason to say yes. Most had not.
The other side of the world
Consider a different parish, in northern Victoria, around Kerang and Boort. The Meering West Wind Farm is wind, not solar, and it is only a proposal. But its developers' website reads like a case study in giving people reasons. Households within ten kilometres of a proposed turbine can sign up to a two-year trial in which the project pays A$50 a month off their electricity bill, with no change of supplier. The trial runs to 30 June 2027. The page says there are "no expectations of project support" attached, and recipients may still object.
The sponsorship list is a small-town census: Boort Football Club, the Kerang Museum, the Kerang Pony Club. If the wind farm is approved and built, the promises grow. A yearly A$8,000 goes to dwellings 2 to 2.5 kilometres from a turbine, falling by A$1,000 for every additional 500 metres. The bill discount continues for homes six to ten kilometres away. A grant fund receives A$4,000 per turbine per year, and about A$2.1 million a year goes to two shires in lieu of rates. The developers say the terms may change.
The scheme is unusual only in its specificity. And it is worth being straight about what Australia does, because the folk version, in which hosts get a profit share and free power, is not quite the real one.
What Australia actually does
The backbone is a levy, not a dividend. New South Wales expects large solar projects to set aside A$850 per megawatt per year, indexed to inflation, for the life of the project. That is A$1,050 for wind. On a 100 MW solar farm, that comes to A$85,000 a year. The state says more than A$127 million has been committed since the guideline began in November 2024. The same guideline lists "energy discounts or free connections" and co-ownership as things a developer may offer, not must. Some developers worried that the final text turns those rates into a ceiling.
Victoria pays hosts of new transmission lines A$8,000 per kilometre per year for 25 years, on top of statutory compensation. Queensland has legislated: major projects must reach binding community benefit agreements with councils before they can lodge an application, though the state sets no sum. Some developers go further than any rule. ENGIE promises up to A$1,000 a year in bill rebates to nearby households for the life of future assets. Squadron Energy's Clarke Creek wind pilot offers A$1,000 a year to homes within 20 kilometres. Windlab has proposed annual payments of A$10,000 to A$75,000 to neighbours of its Bungaban wind farm, which it says do not restrict objections.
Why the rush? Because the gap between hosts and neighbours is what turns villages against each other. The Clean Energy Council and Farmers for Climate Action estimate that over 25 years large wind and solar projects will pay landholders between A$7.7 billion and A$9.7 billion, against about A$1.9 billion to regional communities and councils. Those who sign leases are paid. Those who look at the panels over the hedge are not.
Ownership is rarer. The Haystacks Solar Garden at Grong Grong, in the Riverina, is a 1.5 MW farm where people locked out of rooftop solar buy "plots" through a cooperative and receive credits on their bills. It has 407 members and 149 plot holders, and its development application drew no objections. It is tiny, and the nearest Australian example to "a share of the profits".
And the "free power" in the headlines? Australia's Solar Sharer Offer, in force since 1 July 2026, gives eligible smart-meter households in New South Wales, South Australia and south-east Queensland three free midday hours, up to 24 kilowatt-hours a day. It is a retail rule that applies to everyone on the plan, not a reward for hosting a solar farm. The host-community equivalent is the bill-credit pilots above.
What the evidence says, and what it does not
Here the honest answer is humbler than the policy documents. The best-known review of North American wind research, by Joseph Rand and Ben Hoen, found "NIMBY" an invalid explanation for opposition, socioeconomic impacts strongly tied to acceptance, and fairness, participation and trust influential too. A 2025 systematic review of 212 studies found financial capital the most frequently cited factor, with process fairness close behind. That rests on how often money is mentioned, not on a test of whether paying people changes the outcome.
On ownership, a Scottish survey found residents of communities with some ownership more accepting of their local wind farm, and a co-operative did as well as full community ownership. Belgian co-operative members held warmer attitudes than non-members, though members chose to join. These are attitude surveys, not trials of what a payment does to a planning outcome.
The strongest warnings come from elsewhere. In a Swiss survey about a nuclear waste repository, acceptance fell from 50.8 per cent to 24.6 per cent when compensation was offered, which the authors read as civic duty crowded out by self-interest. That was nuclear waste and a hypothetical. A German study found that financial benefits won over residents with weak views and did nothing for opponents. A 2025 review of European schemes by the Technical University of Denmark concluded that compensation without procedural justice is "likely insufficient", and that mandatory schemes can raise acceptance more than voluntary ones, which can look like bribes. An experiment on a hypothetical offshore wind farm found that telling people benefits were legally required raised support.
Ireland's own research is mixed in a useful way. SEAI's CoWind work, on wind, found that community benefit funds and co-ownership generally help, that the €1,000 minimum for near neighbours is seen as too low, and that amenities did more for acceptance than direct payments. People will invest only small, low-risk sums. For solar specifically, the best study I found is American: a national survey of neighbours of existing large solar farms. Some 43 per cent supported more, 39 per cent were neutral and 18 per cent opposed, and perceived quality of life, landscape and property values mattered far more than distance. Only about 17 per cent knew of the project before it was built, which is the case for earlier engagement in one number.
Stated-preference polls are generous to the argument. A YouGov poll commissioned by the company Veolia found 61 per cent of Australians would welcome renewable facilities closer to home if offered bill discounts, while 27 per cent put community-activity funding in their top five incentives. Hypothetical, commissioned, and no measure of behaviour, but a bill credit beats a grant fund by more than two to one.
My reading is that the evidence is real but conditional. Nobody has shown that a payment alone moves a project from refusal to consent. Money helps most among the undecided and works best when it is fair, early, mandatory and separate from the planning decision. It does least among committed opponents.
Where Ireland stands
Ireland has built more of the machinery than it advertises. Every project in the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme must run a Community Benefit Fund at a minimum of €2 per megawatt-hour, held for fifteen years. The fifth auction, which provisionally cleared 860 megawatts of solar and 219 of wind, will deliver about €45 million over the life of the scheme, around €3 million a year. On my arithmetic that is roughly €2,800 per megawatt per year across all that capacity, though solar, which generates fewer megawatt-hours per megawatt than wind, would come out lower.
Household payments are the gap. The government page sets €1,000 a year for each home within a kilometre of an onshore wind project, with smaller sums out to two kilometres. I found no equivalent rule for solar. A neighbour of a solar array can watch a community fund go to the hurling club and still receive nothing. A community-ownership route exists: RESS has a preference category for projects of up to 5 MW at least 51 per cent owned by a Renewable Energy Community. In the first auction it was capped at 30 gigawatt-hours a year, about one per cent of potential supported volume.
Meanwhile, the planning system is doing something curious. By my count, of 28 solar-farm decisions on An Coimisiún Pleanála's published renewables table since January 2025, it granted 27 and one was withdrawn. In ten of the 27 the planning authority had refused first, in Laois, Kildare, Carlow, Cork and elsewhere. Public opinion is not the enemy: SEAI's 2022 doorstep survey found about 80 per cent of people were positive about solar farms, whether they lived next to one or more than ten kilometres away.
Read that together and the story is not a country that hates solar. It is a country where local decisions go one way and national ones go another, and the people in between feel they are being processed. The Planning and Development Act 2024 puts statutory timelines on the Commission, from 18 weeks for smaller appeals to 48 for strategic infrastructure, and rewrites judicial review. Speed will help developers. It will not tell a neighbour why the field next door pays the farmer and not them.
The argument
The case, then, is not that money buys consent. It is that fairness is part of what consent is made of, and at present the arithmetic of a solar farm is unfair at the hedge. One household is paid. The next, with the same view, is not. A scheme that fixes that does not need to outbid the objectors. It needs to be visible, predictable and independent of whatever the developer thinks of the neighbours.
Three things follow. The first is to extend the near-neighbour payment, or a bill credit of the same value, to solar, funded from the existing €2 per megawatt-hour. The second is to make a low-risk stake available to the people nearest, in the style of Denmark, which has required developers to offer at least 20 per cent of new wind projects to local residents since 2009, extended to supported solar in 2018. Shares go first to those within 4.5 kilometres, at cost price, with no profit to the developer. For wind, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania offers a menu: shares, cheaper tariffs, a payment to the municipality, or a savings bond. The third is to say plainly, in law and in the leaflet, that none of this is a condition of consent. England's wind guidance says community benefits cannot be weighed in a planning decision. The aim is not to purchase a "yes". It is to make sure a "no" is not the only way a parish gets heard.
The objections
The strongest counter is the oldest: pay people and you may corrode what you wanted. Aitken's work found that voluntary, vague payments can be read as bribes, and the Swiss result shows civic-minded people can resent a price tag. The answer is to avoid ambiguity, not payment. Make it mandatory, published and open to everybody, objectors included. Windlab's terms, which it says ask only for a chance to fix problems before they escalate, show how.
The second is that process matters more. It does; every serious review says so. A generous cheque after a contemptuous consultation is likely to be taken as an insult, and the 17 per cent awareness figure suggests that in many places the problem is too little warning, not too little money.
The third is that Ireland is already approving solar. True, but ten reversed refusals in under two years are ten rounds of objection, appeal and bitterness, each leaving a neighbourhood warier of the next project. A benefit scheme cannot promise to end that. It might shrink the number who feel they are only being told.
The fourth is practical. England's guidance warns that bill-discount schemes are administratively heavy, can take up to a year to set up and lose take-up when people must switch supplier. Australia's pilots run for two years and are then reviewed, an admission that nobody yet knows how well they work.
What we owe the parish
In County Galway more than 350 submissions went to the council. Some will have objected to the panels, some to the roads, and some, one suspects, to the sense that a development of this scale had been decided somewhere else, for someone else. We cannot know which, and a planning file does not ask.
A country that wants thousands of hectares of solar should be able to tell a parish, in a sentence, what it gets. Not a pony-club sponsorship and not a cheque for silence. An honest share, clearly stated, that does not change the planning decision, and that shows the sun is meant for the people under it too.
Sources
1. Galway County Council refusal, RTE News, 30 Sept 2026: https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2026/0930/1593565-galway-county-council-refuses-permission-for-solar-farm/
2. Meering West Wind Farm, community page: https://meeringwestwindfarm.com.au/community/
3. NSW Benefit-Sharing Guideline (Nov 2024): https://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-11/benefit-sharing-guideline.pdf
4. NSW Government, priority energy projects (A$127m committed): https://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/nsw-plans-and-progress/regulation-and-policy/priority-energy-projects
5. RenewEconomy on the apparent cap: https://reneweconomy.com.au/renewable-energy-developers-raise-questions-about-apparent-cap-on-community-funds-in-nsw/
6. VicGrid, compensation and landholder payments: https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/700105/Compensation-and-landholder-payments-factsheet.pdf and https://www.vicgrid.com.au/community/community-benefits
7. ABC News, wind farm neighbour payments (May 2025): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-14/wind-farm-neighbour-payments-offered-to-ease-community-tension/105243272
8. ENGIE rebate: https://engie.com.au/renewablesrebate and Squadron Energy, Clarke Creek bill bonus: https://squadronenergy.com/power-promise-program/clarke-creek-bill-bonus/
9. Haystacks Solar Garden, Community Power Agency: https://www.cpagency.org.au/project/haystacks-solar-garden/
10. Energy Made Easy, Solar Sharer Offer: https://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au/hot-topics/solar-sharer-offer-what-you-need-to-know
11. Rand and Hoen (2017), Thirty years of North American wind energy acceptance research: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/30-years-of-wind-acceptance.pdf
12. Systematic review of 212 studies, Sustainability 2025: https://doi.org/10.3390/su17146623
13. Scottish ownership study, Energy Policy 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522004761
14. Bauwens and Devine-Wright (2018): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.03.062
15. Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997): https://www.bsfrey.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/the-cost-of-price-incentives-an-empirical-analysis-of-motivation-crowding-out.pdf
16. DTU policy brief (2025), summarising Knauf (2022), Walker et al. (2017) and Aitken (2010): https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/files/426953459/Policy_brief_financial_compensation_and_benefit-sharing_of_renewable_energy_projects.pdf
17. SEAI CoWind policy brief: https://www.seai.ie/sites/default/files/2026-08/RDD-00281-Policy-Brief-Cowind.pdf and SEAI national survey key findings (2023): https://www.seai.ie/sites/default/files/publications/SEAI-RESS-National-Survey-Key-Findings.pdf
18. Rand et al. (2025), US large-scale solar neighbours: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-energy-policy/articles/10.3389/fsuep.2025.1579170/full
19. Veolia/YouGov survey (Apr 2025): https://www.anz.veolia.com/en-au/newsroom/newsroom/aussies-say-we-want-renewables
20. RESS 5 results: https://gov.ie/en/department-of-climate-energy-and-the-environment/press-releases/minister-obrien-welcomes-results-of-national-auction-for-new-onshore-wind-and-solar-energy-projects/ ; Community Benefit Funds: https://gov.ie/en/department-of-climate-energy-and-the-environment/publications/community-projects-and-benefit-funds-ress/ ; RESS community-led category: https://www.rescoop.eu/uploads/rescoop/downloads/Irish-case-summary.pdf
21. An Coimisiun Pleanala, renewable energy decisions: https://www.pleanala.ie/en-ie/statistics/renewable-energy-applications-appeals-lodged-by-mo
22. Planning and Development Act 2024, key reforms: https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/publications/key-policy-reforms-planning-and-development-act-2024/
23. Denmark, Energistyrelsen, purchase-option scheme: https://ens.dk/media/1875/download 24. England, community benefits guidance for onshore wind: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/community-benefits-and-engagement-guidance-for-onshore-wind/community-benefits-guidance-for-onshore-wind-in-england-accessible-webpage
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