ASL Senior Manager speech at the Solar & Storage Live Conference

Solar and Storage Live Queensland 18 March 2026

Speech by: Jodana Anglesey, Senior Manager, Social Value & Engagement

 

Good afternoon.

It’s a pleasure to be here on Jagera and Turrbal Country today. I pay my respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.

Australia’s renewable energy transition is complex, and projects are delayed for many reasons – from grid constraints to planning and cost pressures.

But increasingly, what determines whether projects proceed isn’t just technical viability – it’s whether communities feel respected in how decisions are made.

Interestingly, when people push back on projects, it’s not necessarily because they oppose renewable energy itself.

More often, it’s because they don’t feel respected in how decisions about where projects go, how they operate, and who carries the impacts.

For a long time, social licence was treated as something you dealt with in planning: consult – comply – move on.

That approach no longer holds.

Today, it doesn’t just create reputational risk – it creates delivery risk.

So, today I want to focus on three things:

First, why social licence can’t be treated as a planning hurdle anymore. 

Second, what real solar and storage projects reveal about what works – and what doesn’t.

And third, two ideas we often blur together in this sector: social licence and social value. They’re closely related, but they’re not the same.

I’ll come back to that distinction later.

I’m responsible for social value strategy at ASL.

We work alongside governments to deliver large‑scale energy infrastructure through competitive tender schemes – including in New South Wales, at the Commonwealth level, and in South Australia.

We don’t build projects. But we do help shape the rules of the game – what the requirements are, and what “good” looks like, and what gets awarded.

And what we’re seeing is that old, linear model engagement – where consultation is treated as a step to get through rather than a process to stay with – no longer reflects reality.

Communities are better informed.

They’re more organised.

And they are increasingly willing to delay, redesign, or stop projects they feel are imposed on them.

I have a couple of case studies to share with you today; but before we get into individual examples, it’s important to ground this in data.

Looking across the 2019 to 2025 period, what stands out isn’t just the number of delayed projects – it’s where and why those delays are occurring.

In states like NSW and Victoria, regions hosting clusters of wind, solar and storage projects have experienced long approval timelines driven by cumulative impacts, environmental concerns, cultural heritage issues, and organised community opposition.

Wind projects have faced the longest delays, but solar has not been immune with redesigns, scale‑backs and withdrawals where farmland, landscape or heritage concerns weren’t addressed early.

And batteries, as a newer technology, are now starting to feature more prominently in objection data, with safety and emergency response emerging as defining issues.

The pattern is consistent across jurisdictions: when social impacts aren’t managed early, delivery risk shows up later – in time, cost, and trust.

This is no longer fringe. It’s becoming systemic.

There’s an important nuance worth calling out here though.

Recent national sentiment tracking shows most Australians remain broadly supportive of the energy transition and many think it needs to happen faster.

But that support sits alongside very real anxiety about cost of living, energy bills, and who bears the impacts locally.

What the research tells us is this: people are open to change – even to faster approvals – as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of environmental protection, community voice, or fairness.

So, community pushback isn’t a rejection of the transition. It’s a signal about how it’s being delivered. And that distinction matters.

When you look across contested projects, a consistent set of concerns comes up again and again.

• Environment and biodiversity – Communities are increasingly unwilling to trade off sensitive landscapes, wetlands or threatened species habitat for speed.
• Land use and visual impact – Solar arrays, battery compounds and associated infrastructure still feel industrial when they land close to homes, townships, or high-value agricultural land – especially in regions already hosting multiple projects.
• Health and safety – particularly for batteries – Fire risk, emergency response, and what happens when something goes wrong matter far more to communities than technical probability assessments.
• And cultural heritage and trust – Projects that don’t get First Nations engagement right early, are increasingly at risk – legally as well as reputationally.

Keep these themes in mind because you’ll hear them again in the examples I’m about to walk through.

I’ve chosen these not because they’re extreme, but because they’re increasingly typical.

Case study 1: On paper, this project stacked up – grid‑connected, policy‑aligned, technically sound.

But locally, residents were concerned about visual impact, farmland and scale – more than 200,000 panels close to homes and road corridors.

Consultation occurred, but too late to meaningfully influence layout and scale.

Opposition escalated. And in 2025, the project was withdrawn.

The lesson here is simple: solar projects aren’t automatically accepted. When people feel excluded from early design decisions, opposition can escalate quickly – and be very hard to recover from.

Case study 2: Our second example is one of Australia’s largest solar farms.

Planning impacts seemed manageable. The tension came after commissioning – glare complaints, amenity impacts, and frustration that engagement dropped away once the project went live.

The operator responded with further studies and operational changes. The project continues – but not without reputational cost.

This shows that social licence can quietly erode during operations if engagement stops at “go-live”.

Case study 3: In 2021, a fire during commissioning changed the conversation overnight.

There were no injuries. But suddenly, the focus shifted to fire risk, emergency response, and preparedness.

What mattered was the response: pausing commissioning, redesigning safety systems, and working closely with emergency services.

For batteries in particular, perceived safety risk can outweigh climate benefit. Trust depends less on probability, and more on visible preparedness.

Case study 4: Finally, in Queensland’s Western Downs, multiple solar farms have been built over the last decade.

Early concern gave way to acceptance as developers hired locally, worked through councils, shared benefits, and stayed present after construction.

Solar became part of the landscape — not loved, not invisible, but accepted.

Communities tend to judge projects as part of a pattern of behaviour over time – not in isolation.

When you step back from these examples, a few things are clear:

• solar is not “low impact” by default;
• batteries trigger safety concerns;
• timing beats messaging;
• operational presence matters; and
• familiarity changes everything.

And this brings us back to the distinction I flagged earlier.

Social licence is about permission and risk.

It’s the threshold question: can this project proceed without sustained opposition, delay, or loss of trust?

Social licence is fragile, contextual, and often invisible — until it’s gone.

Social value, by contrast, is about contribution and outcomes.

It’s what a project actively delivers: local jobs and skills, supplier opportunities, cultural recognition, environmental stewardship, and long‑term community benefit.

Social value is intentional. It’s designed, governed and measured — not assumed.

And here’s the key point: You can deliver social value and still lose social licence. And you can secure social licence and deliver very little social value.

Projects that treat community benefit as compensation for poor siting or late engagement rarely build trust. And projects that focus only on avoiding opposition miss the opportunity to leave a positive legacy.

The projects that tend to move fastest — and with the least conflict — are the ones that do both, deliberately and early.

What we’re seeing at the project level is now reshaping how the system itself responds to risk.

Community opposition is more organised and strategic – drawing on environmental law, cultural heritage, emergency management, and cumulative impact.

Land-use conflict has moved to the centre of renewable development, particularly in regions hosting multiple projects.

Cultural heritage and First Nations consent are now deal-shapers, not secondary considerations.

And safety – particularly around batteries and bushfire risk – has emerged as a defining concern.

Taken together, these shifts explain why planning and approval frameworks are tightening – not to slow the transition, but to prevent conflict-driven delay later.

Because unmanaged social risk becomes delivery risk.

And that brings us back to ASL.

When the system responds to social risk in this way, our tender settings must align accordingly.

At ASL, this means we can’t reward box-ticking. Because box-ticking hides risk – it doesn’t manage it.

What we look for instead is evidence of intent, capability, and follow-through:

• early engagement that genuinely influences design;
• benefit sharing that is visible and locally governed; and
• governance that persists into operations.

Social value is not a “nice to have”. It’s weighted alongside price, risk, and technical capability.

Importantly, we don’t expect proponents to guess what “good” looks like. We provide clear tender guidance, and a free social value toolkit with practical resources – from local needs analysis to action planning and supplier guidance. And we’ll continue to evolve those tools, because social licence and social value aren’t static. They’re earned, tested and renewed over decades.

I’ll finish where I started.

Australia’s energy transition isn’t being held back by technology alone. Increasingly, it’s being shaped by how trust is built and maintained.

Trust doesn’t replace good planning or good engineering. But without it, even technically sound projects become harder, slower and more expensive to deliver.

And trust doesn’t come from better brochures or longer EIS documents. It comes from:

• listening earlier;
• sharing control more honestly; and
• treating communities as partners; not obstacles to overcome.

So, when we ask, “Why are communities pushing back?” the more useful questions might be: what expectations are communities now bringing to projects – and how well are we actually responding to them?

The projects that recognise this – and act early – are far more likely to move faster, with less conflict and greater certainty.

Thank you.