Why Wind Projects Stall: The Business Case for Collaborative Design

Key takeaways

Most wind projects don’t fail on engineering or finance – they stall on social feasibility (trust, legitimacy, and fit with place and people).
Collaborative design is not a “nice to have”. It’s a risk-management and value-creation process that’s essential when dealing with shared space.
ELSA’s Renewables AT PACE framework gives developers and host communities a practical way to work together from day one.
A modest early investment in partnership-building and co-design typically costs far less than a few months of project delay. It also makes early-stage investments more secure, and increases the number of successful projects in an investor’s portfolio.

So how did we arrive at these conclusions?

Working with developers and host communities shows a consistent pattern, including:

1) The uncomfortable truth: great projects can still stall

Developers do the hard work – resource assessment, grid studies, finance, preparing the path through environmental and legislative approvals. Yet their projects still hit headwinds – not because turbines can’t generate or capital isn’t available, but because many within the host community feel the project is being done to them, not with them.

What does this mean?

It doesn’t mean communities are anti-renewables or against progress. In fact, most support the energy transition. But when people feel excluded from shaping decisions that directly affect their homes, livelihoods, and landscapes, resistance becomes almost inevitable (See ELSA’s video series “Bridging the Gap”).

Objection is not a rejection of clean energy – it’s a demand for fair process, legitimacy, and respect. Respect not only for people’s concerns and aspirations, but also for the hard work already done within a community to build its identity, sustain local economies, and care for its environment.

What looks like “objection” is usually a signal about three fundamentals:

Legitimacy: “Who decided this, and how – and why?”
Fit: “Does this strengthen or weaken our place to live and work?”
Trust: “Will they listen and adapt when problems arise?”

If those questions aren’t addressed early and credibly, local conversations turn adversarial, timelines stretch, and costs escalate. Everyone loses: the developer, the community, and national climate targets. The only way to reverse this pattern is to address these fundamentals from the very start.

2) The hidden cost of delay (and why the maths favour collaboration)

Every month of delay carries direct costs (legal fees, consultants, redesigns), and much larger opportunity costs (lost generation revenue, lost investor confidence, missed policy windows).

Illustrative economics for 50 MW of onshore wind energy:

Capacity factor: 35%
Annual generation: 50 MW × 0.35 × 8,760 h ≈ 153,300 MWh
Wholesale price (illustrative): €60–€90/MWh
Annual revenue foregone by a one-year delay: ≈ €9.2m–€13.8m

Even a modest early investment in structured, systematic partnership-building for collaborative design is a rounding error against the cost of a single year’s delay.

The exact figures will vary with market conditions, PPAs, and curtailment. But the order of magnitude is clear: time kills returns. A year lost to appeals or redesign erodes tens of millions in value – far more than the cost of early co-design.

3) Why traditional approaches fail

The renewables industry is increasingly using shared space – land and seascapes where people already live, work, and sustain local economies. This demands an innovative approach to project development. Yet many projects still follow the old DAD pattern: Decide – Announce – Defend.

Plans are substantially formed before communities even see them. “Engagement” is treated as a requirement to be discharged, rather than a process for partnership-building or a design brief input.

Communities, seeing their concerns unacknowledged, perceive risks without reassurance – and they push back.

This isn’t about giving anyone a veto. It’s about recognising that social feasibility is as real as geotechnical feasibility. Ignore it and you build fragility into your project from day one.

4) The business case for collaboration

As renewable projects expand into shared landscapes and seascapes, the stakes are rising. Developers must not only secure land rights and permits but also earn legitimacy in places where people already live, work, and invest their own efforts. The old model of pushing ahead and dealing with objections later is no longer tenable.

Collaboration is not about slowing things down. It is about creating robust projects that can withstand scrutiny and build lasting support. From a business perspective, collaboration is both defensive and offensive – it reduces risks while creating new value.

Risk management benefits

Faster consents: fewer surprises → fewer objections → fewer appeals.
Lower cost volatility: less rework, fewer last-minute delays or “sweeteners.”
Smoother permitting, construction & operations: issues are aired and resolved in partnership, not in DAD stand-offs or the press.

Value creation benefits

Better siting & design: local knowledge avoids costly mistakes and reveals synergies with community development needs.
Stronger licence to operate: trust compounds and pays back over the investment’s life, and spills into future investments by ways of reputation.
Investor & ESG credibility: transparent process, measurable support outcomes.
Portfolio advantage: boards and lenders reduce risk premiums when they see a repeatable, successful social-feasibility discipline.

Bottom line: Investing a fraction of project budget into structured collaboration early typically saves years later – delivering orders-of-magnitude better ROI on the initial investment.

5) What collaboration looks like in practice (it’s structured, not vague)

“Work with the community” can sound soft. But in ELSA it’s disciplined, time-bound, and built around a clear framework: Renewables AT PACE.

Anchor – Get your own house in order
Clarify purpose, standards, and what “responsible project design” means. Align board and senior team on why co-design is a risk-reduction strategy.
Transition – Build capability to show up well
Equip the team for open dialogue. Map stakeholders beyond the usual suspects; surface both concerns and hopes.
Partner – Design the goals and engagement together
Agree ground rules, timelines, and decision boundaries. Bring in Trusted Intermediaries where needed to bridge gaps.
Acknowledge – Face into the hard stuff
Put real constraints and local impacts on the table. Share each party’s non-negotiables honestly; invite alternatives where scope exists.
Collaborate – Co-create the plan
Use structured workshops, visualisation, participatory assessments, and scenario trade-offs. Document and share how choices were made.
Empower – Make it durable
Create a joint developer–host community project team for engagement, assessment, and promotion. Set up clear, ongoing channels that run through permitting, construction, and operations. Measure and report on mutual gains – not just compensation – alongside reduced risks and lessons learned.

This is what turns “engagement” from a defensive, PR-driven, or tokenistic ritual into a design discipline. AT PACE makes collaboration that delivers mutual success repeatable – establishing a solid local support pillar for your project, alongside the core technical, financial, and permitting pillars.

6) A simple comparison (DAD vs co-design)

The contrast is clear. Stick with DAD, and you inherit fragility. Move AT PACE, and you build resilience.

Timing of engagement → DAD: Late, after key decisions / AT PACE: Early, shaping options

Community perception → DAD: “Done deal” → low legitimacy“ / AT PACE: Invited partner” → higher legitimacy

Risk profile → DAD: High: appeals, redesigns, reputational damage / AT PACE: Lower: issues surfaced early, fewer surprises

Cost profile → DAD: Low upfront, high downstream / AT PACE: Moderate upfront, lower downstream – effectively an insurance to protect investment

Outcome quality → DAD: Technically optimised, socially brittle / AT PACE: Technically sound and socially robust

7) “But won’t collaboration slow us down?”

Only if it’s unstructured. In practice, structured early collaboration saves time:

It replaces serial surprises and conflict later with parallel problem-solving now.
It removes irreversible missteps that trigger appeals.
It creates a documented trail of good-faith effort – critical for planning, politics, and relationships with communities.

Think of it like commissioning: you don’t skip quality checks to “go faster.” You do them early so the system works when you switch on.

8) From downside risks to blue-sky opportunity

For boards and investors, the sums are simple:

Not doing AT PACE: one year of delay ≈ €9–14 million lost revenue on a typical 50 MW onshore project.
Doing AT PACE: higher approval probability, smoother permitting, stronger licence to operate, and lower risk to upfront capital.

The investment is modest and manageable: a structured, time-boxed collaboration programme with measurable outputs (stakeholder clarity, agreed ground rules, option logs, community-impact architecture).

This is capex protection and NPV protection. In 2025 and beyond, ignoring social feasibility is as reckless as ignoring financial, technical, or legal due diligence was in the past.

9) How ELSA helps

The Earning Local Support Academy (ELSA) exists to make this doable for busy developer teams and host communities. We provide:

A repeatable framework (AT PACE) that sets expectations, roles, and boundaries.
Trusted Intermediary capability to bridge divides when relationships need it most.
Practical tools: structured dialogues, visualisation, “community & developer SWOTs,” option-trade-off logs, and a transparent record of decisions and benefits.
Capacity-building on both sides, so collaboration doesn’t depend on one facilitator or one individual.
A focus on mutual gains across the project life – not just (non-assessed) compensation through a community benefit fund.

You don’t need to reinvent the social-feasibility wheel on every site. AT PACE gives you a disciplined way to de-risk early and design with the people who live with the outcome.

10) Closing: the smarter bet

Most projects don’t stumble on megawatts or money; they stumble on trust. Collaboration, done right, is the smarter financial bet: fewer surprises, faster progress, and projects that communities can live with – and even be proud of.

And let’s not forget the long game: if we do not embrace a project design method that communities can support, we will make it much harder for politicians and policymakers to back further projects.

Talk to us: ELSA [at] AstonECO [dot] com and let’s map what collaboration would look like for your key projects.