The Policy and Planning Case for Renewables AT PACE

Lost trust kills progress. Strong legitimacy accelerates delivery.

Across Ireland and beyond, planning authorities and policymakers face an immense challenge: delivering ambitious renewable-energy targets at pace while maintaining public confidence and fairness. Yet too often, projects arrive in conflict – dividing communities, overwhelming the planning system, and eroding political support.

The missing foundation isn’t ambition or technology. It’s the absence of a clear process for shared design and accountability – a structured approach that builds the legitimacy and alignment needed to enable projects to be developed successfully within shared space. This is the fourth essential pillar for project delivery: local support, alongside technical, financial, and legal rigour.

Key takeaways

The pressure: Policymakers must deliver ambitious energy targets while safeguarding legitimacy.
The risk: Traditional project development approaches like DAD (Decide–Announce–Defend) create conflict, appeals, costly delays, and contested projects – overwhelming planning systems, and undermining trust and targets.
The solution: Grounded in research and tested in practice, collaborative design through the Renewables AT PACE framework delivers projects that are fairer to communities, faster to permit, and more reliable for investors.
The governance gain: Embedding AT PACE strengthens legitimacy, eases planning pressure, and accelerates delivery.

1) The challenge for authorities

Governments have set ambitious 2030 and 2050 renewable energy targets. To meet these, authorities and industry are tasked with advancing projects at unprecedented scale and speed. Yet many projects stall – not because of weak engineering or finance, but because they fail on social feasibility: the equivalent of technical feasibility, but for local trust, legitimacy, and fit with people and place.

These barriers are intensified by growing public scepticism. The ‘public interest’ argument no longer applies as straightforwardly as some might expect to renewable energy infrastructure. Rising demand from data centres and other major consumers, the corporate orientation of much of the gain, and the ever-increasing home energy bills are just some of the aspects that don’t go unnoticed in host communities. When these realities are unacknowledged, and the ‘climate’ and ‘security’ cards are played too simplistically when talking about the acceptability of renewable energy projects’ externalities, trust in overall fairness erodes.

The result?

Overloaded planning systems consumed by appeals and objections, with limited clarity on which projects are responsible and should proceed versus those rightly rejected.
Missed national targets due to project attrition.

Political costs as local conflicts undermine confidence in the energy transition.

2) Why traditional approaches don’t work

The legacy model of Decide–Announce–Defend (DAD) leaves authorities in the middle of a fight:

Developers arrive with plans substantially formed.
Communities feel sidelined, with their concerns and aspirations unacknowledged.
Authorities are forced to adjudicate disputes – under pressure, with limited resources.

Each appeal, redesign, and contested decision further drains resources, delays delivery, and weakens the legitimacy of both the planning system and the energy transition itself.

3) What AT PACE offers policymakers, authorities, and agencies

Grounded in peer-reviewed research and tested in practice, the Renewables AT PACE framework – developed through ELSA in collaboration with partners in Ireland and overseas – provides a structured, repeatable method for collaborative project design.

For policymakers and planning authorities, this means:

Faster, smoother permitting: Issues are surfaced and addressed early, improving alignment with community priorities and reducing appeals.
Greater legitimacy and fairness: When ground rules are co-created and concerns are openly addressed, decisions carry more weight and are more defensible.
Alignment with national targets: Fewer stalled projects means more clean megawatts delivered on time – at lower overall cost and with stronger public backing.

Reduced workload and political risk: By embedding collaboration upstream, relevant governmental agencies spend less time firefighting disputes, and more time enabling responsible delivery that works for both host communities and developers.

4) The governance innovation

AT PACE is not just about project development and engagement – it is about strengthening democratic legitimacy in the energy transition.

For policymakers: it ensures renewable energy expansion is seen as fair, value-adding, and accountable.
For planning authorities: it offers a defensible process, reducing the burden of contested decisions.
For the public: it shows that national climate goals are being delivered with communities, not at their expense.

By embedding collaboration into policy design, permitting guidance, and project evaluation, governments can transform their requirement for public participation from an obstacle into an enabler of delivery.

5) Result: a surer path to national delivery

Renewable energy will reshape landscapes, seascapes, and communities. Policymakers and authorities face a clear choice:

Stick with DAD, and continue to face appeals, delays, and declining public trust.
Or embed AT PACE, and deliver projects that are faster, fairer, and more resilient.

For authorities and policymakers, AT PACE is the smarter governance innovation: protecting legitimacy, easing pressure on the planning system, and accelerating the national energy transition.

Want to explore implementation? – Contact ELSA [at] AstonECO [dot] com to discuss how AT PACE can be integrated into national or regional planning guidance.