Liz Murray looks at the crossroads between private equity and community power that Scotland faces when building and repowering its windfarms – and why democratic ownership of our energy infrastructure must power any Just Transition worthy of its name.

Since it opened in 2008, Whitelee windfarm – the UK’s largest on shore wind farm, just 10 miles south of Glasgow – has become a symbol of the shift to renewable energy in Scotland. It’s now due for repowering: replacing and upgrading its older turbines with newer, more efficient technology. ScottishPower Renewables recently announced its plans spend £1.5bn to do this, taking Whitelee’s generating capacity from just over 500MW to double that at around 1GW.

This moment of Whitelee’s repowering, and of many other wind farms across Scotland, offers a huge opportunity to make the issue of ownership central to the next phase of the build-out of renewable energy. It represents the chance to shift the balance from private capital towards public and community ownership.

ScottishPower Renewables claims that Whitelee will “set the repowering standard”. So far though, it’s not clear what that “standard” will mean. Will it repeat an old story: communities host the infrastructure, private companies make the profits, and the public is asked to be grateful for a meagre community benefit fund? Or will Scotland’s biggest onshore wind farm change that relation ship and really set a new “standard” – one of genuine ownership opportunities for the surrounding communities?

This new standard must be ownership over tokenism, equity over compensation, and long-term, local control over ad hoc grants. While community benefit funds can support good projects, they leave the basic power relationship intact – with ownership concentrated in private hands. Local and community ownership of renewables challenges and changes that relationship. It gives communities a durable asset that they control and which can fund services, tackle fuel poverty and build resilience.

A just transition must mean greater democratic control over the wealth that Scotland’s energy resources create. That means shifting economic power, not simply changing the fuel source while leaving ownership, pricing and decision-making untouched. Scot land’s renewable resources are national assets, but too often they are treated as opportunities for extraction by multinational companies, distant investors and shareholders.

Research by the Centre for Local Economies showed that be tween 2019 and 2024, Scotland’s onshore wind sector made an estimated £5.6 billion in post-tax profits. Around 73% of that profit – £4.1 billion – is estimated to have been paid in dividends to corporate shareholders, with £729 million of that to companies owned by private equity or based in tax havens.

If there had been even a 20% shared ownership stake in those commercially owned onshore wind farms, as is the norm in Den mark, communities would have made around £827m in total income over the same five years, or £165m per year. However, just 0.4% of Scotland’s entire onshore wind capacity was in shared ownership as of last year. That’s a huge missed opportunity for community wealth building in Scotland – and something that we need to work together to turn around.

This is where the Our Power campaign comes in, with a central argument that is simple and popular: the people of Scotland should get a fair share of the nation’s renewable energy wealth. Its demands give everyone a practical programme to rally around. More communities should have the chance to own energy projects, rather than being passive hosts. Councils should be funded and enabled to invest in local renewable energy projects, so that income from clean power can support local services. The Scottish Government should take a public stake in all future offshore wind projects, with a 20% equity share funded through bodies such as the Scottish National Investment Bank. And Scotland needs a secure wind manufacturing base so that the transition creates stable, unionised, well-paid jobs here rather than exporting manufacturing work elsewhere.

These are not technical tweaks for policy papers, they are organising demands. They connect the household struggling with bills to the worker demanding secure employment, the community fighting for local services to the climate campaigner pushing for rapid decarbonisation. Other countries have used public stakes, community ownership and cooperative models to retain more value from renewables. Scotland has examples too: community and local authority renewable energy projects from Orkney and the Western Isles to Aberdeenshire, Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders already show how income from these projects can be invested in housing, transport, care, local employment and climate action. The problem is not a lack of evidence – it’s a lack of political action.

The left should be clear: ownership of energy is climate policy, industrial policy and anti-poverty policy. It determines who pays, who benefits, who decides and whose lives are improved as we transition away from fossil fuels. Scotland’s renewables transition can either become another chapter in the long history of resource ex traction, or it can become the basis of a more democratic economy. The difference will not be decided by turbine technology alone. It will be decided by whether we build enough power—political, economic, community and workplace power—to make that democratic economy happen