Can communities own the energy transition?

Who should own the infrastructure powering the transition to net zero, and how early should communities be invited into the conversation? In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, we speak with Ciara Shannon, Founding Director of the Green Finance Community Hub and Green Finance Lead at the North West Net Zero Hub. Ciara has spent much of her career at the intersection of sustainability, impact investment and green finance, and is now helping develop Project Collette, an ambitious proposed community-led offshore wind project off the coast of Cumbria. At approximately 1.2GW, Project Collette is conceived on a very different scale from most traditional community energy schemes. But the most interesting part of the proposition is not simply the turbines. It is the financial architecture behind them. Ciara explains the project's Community Integrated Investment Model, designed to give local people meaningful participation from an unusually early stage while still enabling the institutional investment required for infrastructure of this size. We explore community benefit societies, community shares, governance, the idea of a restricted golden share, and how community interests might coexist with conventional project finance. The conversation also moves beyond Project Collette itself. Why are so many sustainability professionals occupied with frameworks and measurement while potentially investable projects struggle to get through early-stage development? Why is feasibility capital so difficult to secure? And has sustainability become too focused on avoiding risk rather than enabling experimentation? Ciara argues that there is plenty of capital looking for credible opportunities. The challenge is creating more projects that are genuinely investment ready. For financial planners, investors and anyone interested in sustainable finance, this is a conversation about more than offshore wind. It asks a bigger question, "How might capital be structured so that the communities affected by investment become participants in it too?" If you believe finance can be a force for good, this episode offers plenty to think about.