Wind farms and payments to landowners: Opportunities for rural development for the case of Galicia

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Wind development creates a range of economic impacts at different territorial scales and sectors, one of which is the local sector at the rural level. Yet few studies make an in-depth study on the relationship between the implementation of wind farms and rural development. The literature scarcely analyzes the impact of payments to landowners and their potential for revitalizing rural areas above all in areas lacking public property where community wind farms are legally banned. These two circumstances converge in Galicia, a region in the northwest of Spain that currently operates over 3300 MW of wind power. This paper aims to analyze landowner payments and study their role in the rural development of the Galician territory from the perspective of the current regulatory framework. To this end, it uses different quantitative and qualitative methods such as participatory research tools used in the field work and developed for over 10 years. Our work estimates average payments to landowners and the total flow of wind-generated income reaching the rural areas, which was 0.84 million euros in 1999 and 10.1 million in 2015. It also analyzes final wind revenue destinations and identifies several examples of the dynamization of rural areas based on the innovative use of this income. Rural landowners developed very innovative community initiatives triggering local economic revitalization despite the averse current regulatory framework. The paper concludes that a more advantageous regulatory framework could have had a much greater local impact.