Benefits and Burdens: Exploring the Role of Community Benefits in Wind Energy Development

When local residents want to ensure that their communities benefit from private development, they often turn to Community Benefits Agreements, or CBAs. These legal agreements detail the benefits a developer agrees to fund or furnish in exchange for community support of a project, and these benefits can come in different forms, be developed through diverse processes, and have varying impacts on key outcomes like project success and equity.

Join experts from National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) – Suzanne MacDonald, Senior Researcher & Project Leader and Matilda Kreider, Wind Energy Researcher – for an introduction to community benefit agreements, related funds, and investments being used in offshore and land-based wind energy deployment, including examples from Maine. They will share NREL’s ongoing research on a variety of voluntary mechanisms that developers use to deliver additional financial and/or non-financial benefits to impacted communities. For additional background on this topic, please visit NREL’s Wind Energy Community Benefits Guide.