Large-scale clean energy generation and battery storage projects can help deliver more affordable energy to people across the United States. As with all large infrastructure development, communities that host these projects may have concerns about what benefits the projects will deliver to their community, and the project’s potential impacts. RMI looked at how developers have tried to address these concerns over the past 15 years, including whether the size and type of financial benefits they offered made a difference in whether projects succeeded.
We found that successful projects did not necessarily offer communities more financial value than failed projects. Instead, they more often structured that value in ways that were direct, visible, and responsive to local priorities. For developers, the findings suggest that how community benefits are delivered may matter as much as how much is offered.
Successful projects did not necessarily offer communities more financial value than failed projects. Instead, they more often structured that value in ways that were direct, visible, and responsive to local priorities.
What the data tells us
RMI compiled and analyzed the financial benefit structures that developers offered communities (e.g., tax revenue, host community agreements, community benefits agreements) and the total value of those benefits for more than 200 utility-scale solar, onshore wind, and battery storage projects. These projects all required local approval at the township- or county-level as a key factor in their success or failure and had publicly available information on proposed community benefits. The 96 successful projects represent 17.9 gigawatts and an estimated $33.2 billion in successful investment. We also analyzed 101 projects that failed to secure local permits, representing 18.8 gigawatts and an estimated $33.6 billion in unrealized investment.
This analysis identifies patterns in how financial benefits were structured across successful and failed projects; it does not establish that benefit structure caused a project to succeed or fail. Other factors can shape local permitting outcomes besides developers’ offers to provide benefits and mitigate impacts, such as project characteristics and local sentiments, as well as other non-public factors like grid interconnection cost estimates. However, an aspect of local denial was present for all the failed projects in our analysis, enabling the comparison and evaluation of benefit structures relative to project outcomes.
We found that developers of successful projects offered approximately the same amount of money to host communities as projects that failed to secure local permits. One pronounced difference was how those benefits were structured. Projects that successfully navigated local opposition and secured local permits more often used a combination of structures to make project value direct, visible, and controllable for communities. Furthermore, successful projects more often offered structures designed to benefit members of the broader community, in addition to hosting landowners and local government.
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