EUAA Submission: Enhancing Community Engagement in Transmission Building
Emily Wood | September 28, 2023
The EUAA is supportive of the AEMC rule change to improve engagement in relation to large transmission infrastructure. There are a number of elements that in our view should be used to assess success in this area and should be part of the implementation plan to achieve a better outcome in communities.
Delivering the energy transition is an enormous and complex project. It requires many moving parts in the energy system to adapt and in many cases, infrastructure to be completely rebuilt. These changes will impact many hundreds of thousands of people via visual impacts, physical changes to their community and the need to change the way their use energy and live their lives. This is especially so for those who will be hosting the energy infrastructure of the future. These impacts create stress. Effective community engagement builds respect between parties aiming to create empowerment in communities and to all them to influence or have some decision-making abilities.
It is clearly evident where community engagement has not gone well as projects come to a standstill due to community opposition. We have said many times that while the regulatory process may slow you down, social license can stop you dead in your tracks. If we are to reach Net Zero in the most efficient and cost-effective manner, working with communities effectively will be critical. However, effective engagement requires some key ingredients, one of the biggest being time. Trying to rush community engagement, or create perceived short cuts, creates distrust and other unintended consequences including deep divides in communities that often end up costing more in the long run….’
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