And no, a playground next to a wind turbine does not count as fairness.
We are living through the most intense phase of infrastructure expansion Europe has seen in decades: building out grids, deploying renewables, electrifying transport and heating systems, digitising control centres, and trying to stitch it all together before climate chaos outruns us. But for all this ambition, something keeps stalling the process. It is not the lack of money. It is not the lack of public support. It is the absence of something far less tangible, and far more consequential: trust.
The KPI No One Dares Measure
This week on Energ’ Ethic Podcast , I spoke with Seda Orhan , Renewable Energy Programme Manager at Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe , about what might be the most elusive, and most ignored, dimension of the energy transition: fairness.
Seda and her team have just published a clear-sighted, practical, and frankly overdue report: Community Engagement and Fair Benefit Sharing of Renewable Energy Projects. It sets out 14+1 key performance indicators that go beyond hollow slogans or vague commitments, and instead offer a framework to assess (or not) whether communities are being informed, included, and allowed to benefit in a way that’s meaningful.
We talk endlessly about public acceptance, as if it’s a communications problem. It isn’t. Many renewable projects fail not because people oppose clean energy, but because they experience the process as extractive, top-down, and indifferent to local knowledge, context, or need.
And that is the real issue. It’s not just whether we inform. It’s whether we share agency, ownership, decision-making, and above all, respect.
Infrastructure Without Relationships Is Just Land Use
We can’t ignore the scale of what’s ahead. The EU’s 2040 climate targets will require a doubling or even tripling of renewable generation. That means more wind turbines, more solar farms, more storage, more grid lines, and more people asked to live with the consequences.
But where is the infrastructure of trust?
The numbers are daunting:
- At least €584 billion in grid investments will be needed by 2030.
- In just seven countries, curtailment and congestion already cost us over €7.2 billion a year.
- And across 16 EU Member States, 1,700 GW of renewable capacity is stuck in connection limbo.
All of this comes with major distributional questions.
Who pays for these upgrades? Who gets priority access? Who decides what’s “strategic,” and whose land is suddenly open for use?
These are not technical questions. They are political ones. And they strike at the heart of fairness.
Community opposition typically adds an average of 11 months to solar and 14 months to wind project timelines!
Because when people are excluded from decisions but included in the consequences, they resist. And when they resist, the system slows down, sometimes grinds to a halt, not because they are anti-renewables, but because they’re tired of being invisible.
Then came the heatwaves
We can’t afford to put climate change and energy transition on two separate timelines, one unfolding in the future, the other engineered in the present. Tthey are colliding, right now, and nowhere is that more visible than in our cities, our homes, our power systems. It came out pretty clear from the Cool Heating Coalition event I joined this week:
- Cooling is already the fastest-growing source of energy demand in buildings worldwide.
- According to the IEA, if we don’t change course, energy demand for space cooling will triple by 2050.
- Only 1% of installed solutions are passive or nature-based.
- And already, over 50,000 people in Europe die every year due to heat-related causes.
Yet, we continue to treat summer energy poverty as a marginal concern, something for southern countries, or low-income households, or the “most vulnerable,” a term so overused it risks meaning nothing.
But what happened this June in my hometown of Turin should be a wake-up call: As temperatures soared above 40°C, the electrical grid failed across entire districts: blackouts lasting hours, in densely populated areas. The cause? A mix of overheated electrical joints and a surge in air conditioning usage.
Restaurants lost thousands of euros in spoiled food. Residents were trapped in overheated buildings with no ventilation. People lost work. Codacons, the consumer association, is now preparing a class action lawsuit on behalf of residents and business owners. And still, very few are connecting the dots between extreme heat, underprepared infrastructure, and policy failure.
This wasn’t an outlier. It was an early warning. One I has already seen in… Burkina Faso! And it is worth repeating: Unprecedented isn’t uncommon anymore.
And as our climate changes, we need to learn, fast. And act.
Children Born into Crisis
And yet, we still lack the data, political focus, and financial instruments to respond with the urgency that this reality demands.
I’ve seen it in the research, and I’ve heard it in my work with communities: The person who never leaves their apartment because the street is too hot. The kitchen worker who faints because the fan broke. The older neighbour who lowers the blinds but doesn’t call for help, because “others need it more.”
These are not edge cases. They are becoming the baseline. We’re assembling the pieces only now.
Back in 2012, nearly 19% of EU households reported struggling to stay cool in summer. Today, we don’t even have a robust, up-to-date number. That, in itself, is telling.
Researchers like Marie Cavitte have assessed that a child born in Brussels in 2020 will live through 26 times more heatwaves than their grandparents. In southern Europe, including where my own daughter is growing up, those heatwaves will be accompanied by increased drought risk, water stress, and heightened exposure to cascading infrastructure failures.
It is the architecture of daily life for an entire generation.
We must stop pretending that the future is a distant place. It’s already designing our systems, shaping our vulnerabilities, and determining who thrives… and who suffers.
From Performance to Partnership
We love to cite the number: 80% of Europeans support renewables.
But support in theory means little when the project outside your window feels imposed.
If we want speed, we need trust. If we want trust, we need fairness. And if we want fairness, we need to stop thinking of communities as a hurdle, and start seeing them as co-creators.
So what do we do with all this? First, we stop confusing community engagement with performance.
A playground next to a wind farm is not fairness. A leaflet dropped off after the contract is signed is not participation. A “consultation” with no mechanism to shift the design is not trust-building.
In her interview, Seda described a successful wind project in Italy which had received massive support from the residents. The result? No lawsuits. No delays. Just a community that saw itself reflected in the project.
This is not about perfect consensus. It’s about honest dialogue and accountability. And it’s about shifting from what can we get away with to what can we build together.
What Fairness Looks Like
We need:
- Building codes that protect, not just regulate
- Policy coordination that doesn’t leave cities alone or separate mitigation from adaptation
- Better data: we still don’t know how many people can’t afford to cool their homes
- Public conversations that name what’s really at stake: investing in addressing climate change = security and safety of supply
And underneath it all:
- Grid reforms that don’t punish the poor, and
- Project design that starts with people, not permits.
📊 And KPIs, like the 14+1 from CAN Europe, that bring integrity back into the conversation.
Because if the energy transition doesn’t feel fair, it won’t feel like progress. And if it doesn’t feel like progress, it will fail to deliver what it promises.
🎧 Listen to the episode: Trust Is the Fast Track
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/46cTz8ZUBXMktmCN0xuzP5
- Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/trust-is-the-fast-track-seda-orhan-can-europe/id1554278064?i=1000714303005&l=en-GB
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/uUp6SBqFB-M?si=t1ymaJjqvew6p7_T
📄 Read the CAN Europe report: Community Engagement and Fair Benefit Sharing of Renewable Energy Projects
📘 Explore my latest work on summer energy poverty for the EU Commission: Framing the conversation on summer energy poverty in Europe
Because trust isn’t the reward at the end of a process. It’s the foundation we haven’t built yet.
And If we can mend trust and fix our relationships, we can power anything.
