Our submission to the PoweringWA's 'Draft Guideline on Community Benefits for Renewable Energy Projects'.

Community benefits or ‘benefit-sharing’ are standard practice for renewable energy projects, and involve developers making financial or other contributions to host communities to compensate for any negative impacts and to make sure communities share in the financial rewards of the energy infrastructure they’re hosting in their place.

WA hasn’t had a set of guidelines in place for community benefits, which has led to inconsistent practice across the state and the risk of feeding community distrust and resentment. On Thurs 12th June 2025, PoweringWA released their Draft Guideline on Community Benefits for Renewable Energy Projects for consultation. While this is a positive step towards creating clear expectations for developers and equipping communities and local government to secure good outcomes, the Better Climate team also has several concerns about the content, scope, and implementation of these guidelines.

We produced a briefer to bring our network up to speed on community benefits and these guidelines, then held a community webinar and published a survey to gather input from our allies and supporters on what they'd like to see in a set of guidelines like these. Below is our submission to the consultation process for these guidelines, which incorporates that input. In this submission, we're calling for:

• Higher value ranges to make sure communities are fairly rewarded
• Stronger requirements for community participation, legacy benefits, and regional coordination
• Accountability mechanisms to encourage and ensure good practice

This is a crucial opportunity to ensure communities in WA share in the benefits of the energy transition - please read our submission here, sign on to support it here, or click here to write your own.

Get in touch at [email protected] if you’d like to speak about this with us.