Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 2:08 pm on 8 March 2017.
I thank the Cabinet Secretary for that reply. I’m aware of an NRW tender for a single turbine project in south Wales, which is an ideal scale, really, for a community project. The criteria for the tender really are prohibitive for community projects at that scale, requiring track record of delivery and several years’ worth of accounts. I obviously understand the need for due diligence and for there to be appropriate levels of assurance but I note that in the tender, there’s a reference to community benefits being expressed in pounds, which seemed to me to show the limited approach of that. Does she agree with me that we need to try and find ways, consistent with the need for assurance, for these small-scale projects to be genuinely accessible to community energy production?