How community wind power can ease permitting woes

Lawrence Weston is a community of several thousand residents in the city of Bristol, in the west of England, and one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the region.

Between 2014 and 2023 a group of determined residents and supporters led a successful campaign to build an onshore wind turbine in the area through their community action group Ambition Lawrence Weston and subsequent sister group Ambition Community Energy.

They did so overcoming great difficulties including a government-imposed, de-facto ban on onshore wind power in England that the UK’s new centre-left Labour government finally ended several weeks ago.

The resulting turbine — a 4.2MW EP115 EP3 unit supplied by German manufacturer Enercon — began producing electricity last year and is already generating money for Ambition Community Energy and the residents of Lawrence Weston.

Now the people behind the project hope to see it replicated elsewhere.

Two of the project's key proponents — David Tudgey and Charles Gamble — believe they have created a model that can be replicated beyond Lawrence Weston.

“A lot of people will say this is a one-off, that it won’t happen again. But they don’t understand me and Charles. We didn’t do it for eight years just for one demonstration turbine [and] what we have codified is the Sustainable Innovative Financial Foundations for Turbines (SIFFFT),” Tudgey, the project development director at Community Power Solutions, told Windpower Monthly.

The pair’s SIFFFT model seeks to build on the solutions they and others came up with to overcome the major challenges they faced with the Lawrence Weston turbine.

Via Reasons to be Cheerful

The rise of a ‘dangerous’ ideology among parents is causing havoc in custody disputes

During the pandemic, Alia’s* former partner started sending “long-winded rants” via text message. Covid-19 wasn’t real. Stay-at-home rules were unlawful, he told her, and he took their children to anti-lockdown protests. He started to share what she later realised were “sovereign citizen” or pseudolaw ideas.

“He wouldn’t follow anything that the government was saying because ‘it’s not a genuine law, it’s illegal, it’s treason, and it’s all a scam that’s designed to try to bring in the new world order’,” she said.

As the virus spread, they were in the midst of proceedings in the family court over child custody. Alia said she tried to raise his behaviour with the court and other authorities, but felt like it wasn’t taken seriously.

“It was brushed off as, ‘people have different beliefs and people have different political leanings’,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t clearly get across that this was going so much deeper than a different political leaning. That this was potentially putting the kids at risk.”

The impact of sovereign citizen pseudolaw movements – where adherents use “legal argumentation” that has no legal basis, often predicated on a belief in the illegality of or corruption of government – are having a serious impact on the family court.

In 2024, Guardian Australia has tracked almost a dozen family court judgments where these kinds of arguments had an impact on proceedings.

“It’s really an emerging area in the family law jurisdiction that needs to be addressed seriously … given what’s at stake with children involved in these cases,” said Dr Georgina Dimopoulos, an associate professor of law at Southern Cross University.

The issue is also affecting criminal cases involving children. At least two women have been convicted this year of offences related to unlawfully removing children in cases linked to sovereign citizen groups or pseudolaw ideas.