Renewables Have Power to Change Local Lives

In 2022, the world added a record 268 gigawatts of photovoltaic power to the renewable energy mix, bringing solar’s global contribution to 1,185GW —around 3.5 percent of our total electricity consumption. The transition to clean, accessible, affordable, sustainable, and reliable renewable energy is well under way. The global importance can hardly be overstated: the crucial battle to control climate change affects everyone, everywhere. But what is often overlooked are the additional benefits renewable energy brings—the socio-economic development of bringing new investments, jobs, and skills to the regions and communities who embrace these new technologies emerging near their homes.

Responsible energy companies, such as global renewable energy operator Masdar, look beyond their primary focus of generating clean energy to collaborate with the local community and bring them a wide range of benefits: where renewables are deployed, investment follows. In the economically troubled agricultural communities of Western Oklahoma, USA, private farmers are paid to have wind turbines on their land. This tenancy has little impact on their crops but provides an essential financial buffer that has helped to keep many farms viable in difficult times. In Luderitz, Namibia, the town council holds a five-percent share in the adjacent wind farm with lease payments bolstering its stretched public funds. Such arrangements can bring significant local benefits ranging from better transport and street lighting to funding for schools, libraries, and public amenities. This is on top of bringing electricity to the half a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa still living without access.

Sometimes an energy company decides to get more directly involved with helping the local community. Masdar’s ČIBUK 1 wind farm in Serbia is the largest utility-scale commercial wind project in the Western Balkans and provides clean energy to 113,000 homes. But from the start, the company also engaged with local communities on more than a hundred projects including support for schools and medical centres. This directly touched the life of Maja, whose daughter had become ill and whose diagnosis was frustrated by a lack of technology. New medical equipment, funded by the wind farm, included an ultrasound machine that diagnosed Maja’s daughter enabling her to get treatment. “I’m so grateful for the health centre,” says Maja. “They checked my baby and told me everything was going to be okay.”

While renewable energy is designed to deliver clean and affordable electricity for all at a global level, renewable projects are usually sited in remote and sparsely inhabited areas that often have limited access to electricity. The social and economic developments delivered by clean and reliable energy are enormous: it can power communications, facilitate economic transactions, and create employment. It brings essential heating, cooling, and lighting to homes, schools, and workplaces. Fundamentally, it powers local productivity.

In 2017, a report described the remote desert village of Benban, Egypt, as suffering from worsening education, healthcare, and sewage problems. It also had an unstable electricity supply. Today, the construction of the Benban solar park has positively transformed the lives of its inhabitants. Africa’s largest solar park, part operated by Masdar, generates enough electricity to power more than a million homes, including many without previous access to the grid. It also provides reliable electricity to the people of Benban, helping to lift the community out of rural poverty. “When anyone asks me where I work,” says Mohamed Mustafa Mohamed, from Benban, “I tell them I work at Benban solar park.” His pride is palpable. A project goal was to give jobs to the local community, and 100 percent of the site’s unskilled labour is local, bringing money and opportunity to Benban. “God has blessed us with these natural resources,” Mohamed reflects. “I see myself as one of the lucky ones.”

And renewables are boosting more than emerging economies. The flexibility of renewables mean they can be strategically sited in relatively deprived areas of wealthier countries, bringing valuable regional benefits. In 1989 the last coalmine in Kent, England, closed leaving an employment vacuum that was exacerbated by the decline of the region’s fishing and car industries. Two decades later, the London Array was built as the world’s largest offshore wind farm. Today it powers half a million homes and displaces almost a million tonnes of carbon emissions. But to Ronnie Hill, a senior technician on the site, it is even more than this. “From car mechanics to fishermen, we’ve all ended up getting jobs,” says Ronnie, whose father was a coalminer. “It’s good to know that a company like Masdar is investing in an area where I live.” For Ronnie, the generational shift from the dirty world of coalmining to the cleaner life of maintaining wind turbines reflects the global transition to renewable energy.