ELSA

Building Your Fourth Project Pillar: Trust and Local Support Now Decide Project Success

For decades, projects have stood on three solid pillars: Financial, Technical, and Legal. These have long defined a bankable project – one that works on paper, passes due diligence, and can withstand scrutiny in court. But around the world, developers, investors, and authorities are realising that this three-legged foundation is no longer enough.

How Renewables AT PACE Delivers Success for Developers, Communities and Governments

AT PACE isn’t just better engagement – it enables smarter governance: building trust, reducing risk, and creating supported projects that can withstand the pressures facing today’s energy transition and deliver better futures for all.

Why Wind Projects Stall: The Business Case for Renewables AT PACE

The business case for collaborative renewable energy projects: understanding and addressing the community-related root cause for project failures; and how to deliver faster, fairer, better projects

The Host Community Case for Renewables AT PACE

Most communities support renewable projects, but oppose how they are built - often, a process that bypasses local realities and weakens shared purpose. Collaborative design strengthens fairness, cohesion, and local futures.

The Policy and Planning Case for Renewables AT PACE

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.

Building bridges, removing barriers: How ELSA's Co-Design approach revolutionises community-developer relations in renewable energy projects.

ELSA's Co-Design revolutionises renewable energy projects by enhancing community-developer relations, ensuring project acceptance through stakeholder collaboration and empathetic strategies.

Why do developers, government (and some community members) tend to be afraid of community empowerment for commercial renewable energy project Co-Design, and how can we resolve this?

Developers and governments fear community empowerment in renewable energy co-design due to risks of lost control, higher costs, and project delays. Effective, transparent engagement strategies are essential to bridge these divides.

ELSA R&D: Paving the way to earning local support for Ireland's energy security infrastructure

ELSA is the Earning Local Support Academy, a project by AstonECO Management. The transition towards renewable energy is a pressing agenda globally and nationally, and Ireland stands at a pivotal juncture in its journey towards energy security and decarbonization. Despite the positive strides, communities at the grassroots level often find themselves at odds with developers, feeling that their concerns and aspirations are being sidelined. The ELSA project is working to address this.

Delivering the Earning Local Support Academy (ELSA)

At the core of the Earning Local Support Academy (ELSA) is a new mindset, a powerful set of skills and the opportunity to create a successful, inclusive and sustainable future for everybody. ELSA does that through a process called Smart Engagement which delivers Smart Projects: projects that are financially successful, technically sound, environmentally compatible and socially supported. Projects that are wanted by all stakeholders.

The need for the Earning Local Support Academy (ELSA)

Renewable energy is quickly becoming part of our lives and the landscape we live in. This means many lives are directly being impacted by renewable energy developments and more and more will be in the future. In a growing number of cases these developments get rejected by the host communities, by the people who will have to live with the development. The reason for this is often miscommunication and a lack of proper engagement. ELSA will provide the tools and support to build a bridge between the developer and the members of the host community.