It’s a curious quirk of modern placemaking: the same communities who campaign passionately to preserve our monumental cooling towers, redundant power stations and other infrastructure often oppose, with equal fervour, the development of new homes or clean energy infrastructure.
Could understanding this contradiction be the key to delivering both the homes and the power that modern society increasingly depends upon, and can we learn from the rare success stories?
Once reviled as the gritty emblems of industrialisation, structures such as Bankside and Battersea Power Stations have been reborn in the public imagination, celebrated for their heritage, visual drama and cultural cachet.
There are examples throughout the country of local groups seeking to retain disused cooling towers, seeing them as iconic features of the landscape rather than the eyesores which they might have been considered in the past.
COMMUNITY PUSHBACK
And yet, many of the same communities often push back against new energy proposals, whether solar farms, battery storage systems, power lines or onshore wind.
These are cleaner, more efficient and more essential to our net zero future and energy security goals, but they often come up against a deep vein of local resistance.
It is a paradox that planners and policymakers must grapple with, particularly as demand for energy increases and the planning system strains under the weight of objection and delay.
INFRASTRUCTURE BACKBONE
Much like the factories and canals of the industrial revolution, much of the infrastructure of today – data centres, energy hubs, solar arrays and electricity transmission corridors – are the lifeblood of the digital and decarbonised economy.
The demand for reliable, high-capacity energy is growing fast. Our IT-reliant lives, from online meetings to electric vehicles, are heavily dependent on power. Data centres in particular consume vast amounts of energy and they are proliferating across the UK.
The power outage at Heathrow earlier this year and Spain’s recent national blackout are a reminder not only of how we take our power systems for granted but also of how fragile these can be.
If the UK is to remain economically competitive and technologically resilient, our power supply and networks must not only be clean but secure, stable and sufficiently scaled.
SITE SELECTION CHALLENGE
In the 1990s, energy transformation was a quiet evolution. Coal was replaced with gas – remember the ‘dash for gas’? – but much of the new infrastructure used the same sites and networks, with the new plants located on mostly brownfield, already industrialised sites less likely to trigger a community reaction.
Today, renewable energy requires a different configuration. Onshore wind turbines and solar farms typically need expansive, often greenfield sites.
Battery Energy Storage Systems, although relatively compact, are new and unfamiliar to many. Linear infrastructure such as overhead power lines, inevitably spans wide rural areas, often cutting across regions where house prices are high and the perceived value of landscape is greater.
Calls to locate power infrastructure along transport corridors or existing linear routes are common but often prove to be impractical.
Unlike the road or rail networks, which typically radiate from cities and centres of population, the energy network must serve a broader national grid.
Offshore wind farms generate power in remote marine locations – far from the demand centres – requiring extensive onshore connections across sensitive landscapes.
That said, there are some situations, albeit now rare, in which industrial sites can offer opportunities.
There is potential, for example, to reuse former coal- and gas-fired power stations and other industrial sites for small modular reactors, new energy-from-waste plants or as the focus for larger energy hubs.
Such sites benefit from being connected to the grid, they can be relatively isolated and were in industrial use in the past but creatively reusing the structures themselves is rarely feasible.
AESTHETICALLY PLEASING
So, can we make our new energy infrastructure, wherever it is located, more aesthetically pleasing and perhaps more acceptable to the public?
A good example is CopenHill or Amager Bakke, a functioning combined heat and power energy from waste plant in Copenhill, Copenhagen.
The facility processes the waste of more than 500,000 residents and 45,000 businesses each year, generating heat and electricity for almost 150,000 homes.
Significantly, it accommodates a range of recreational areas on its roof including a dry ski slope, hiking trail and climbing wall which many thousands visit each year to pursue sports and enjoy the views of city.
It is not without its detractors but does provide a pointer to how we might live with energy infrastructure in our locality.
WHAT PLACEMAKERS CAN DO
To go some way in addressing the issue of opposition and enable the development of infrastructure we so urgently need, we must reframe how energy is discussed and delivered.
Placemaking can have a key role here, not just in spatial planning but in storytelling, design and community engagement.
Those of us in the planning and development sector must understand the innately human resistance to change and the emotional attachments to landmarks, especially when they signify a sense of continuity or identity, in contrast to the unfamiliarity of new development forms which can feel threatening, anonymous and imposed.
Admittedly Amager Bakke would be costly to replicate (and with rising energy prices it seems unlikely that consumers would be prepared to pay a premium for such a facility via their bills).
A more modest example is the way in which canals have switched from industrial to leisure use, or how railway arches have become pop-ups and artisan venues.
Local benefits – jobs, energy security and financial contributions to community facilities – must be communicated effectively and incorporated from the start of the project.
In my view there’s no real reason why new energy infrastructure cannot compete with the old in our affections, if we start communicating how projects can create and inspire innovation, pride, resilience and local ingenuity. Iconic and innovative design, transparency in purpose and community inclusion in the project can all help.
Popular placemaking also involves accessible public spaces and design quality and, with these features in place, perhaps the affection now attached to old, once maligned structures can be repeated for new energy projects.
CRITICAL THINKING
We are living in an era in which energy is as fundamental to our lives as housing, healthcare and education. Yet infrastructure is too often viewed negatively – as necessary, but unwanted; critical, but uncelebrated.
Until that changes, planning for energy is likely to continue to face friction and our national infrastructure goals will remain frustratingly out of reach.
Understanding the emotional and psychological dynamics of place can unlock a different kind of consent and consensus – based not on acquiescence but on genuine support.
If we can learn to love the new as much as we romanticise the old, we will be far better placed to deliver the clean, reliable energy future we need.
