In this fourth post in a series of reflective blogs from her Churchill Fellowship project, Rebecca Windemer reflects on the introduction of Australia's Developer Rating Scheme.
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In this fourth post in a series of reflective blogs from her Churchill Fellowship project, Rebecca Windemer reflects on the introduction of Australia's Developer Rating Scheme.
We read restaurant reviews before we book a table. We rate drivers after a journey. However, in the UK, we don't currently score renewable energy developers.
Is that something we should be doing? Australia seems to think so.
One of the strongest messages from my Churchill Fellowship travels across Australia and New Zealand was that the energy transition is not just an engineering challenge; it’s one of trust, engagement and bringing communities with us. The relationship between developers and communities sits at the heart of that challenge.
Those of us working in the sector can probably name most of the major renewable energy developers and have a sense of how they differ. For communities, however, that information isn't nearly as accessible. If you're approached by a developer about a project in your area, how do you know whether they’re really listening? Whether they'll keep their promises or deliver the project responsibly? Finding information about their track record isn't always straightforward.
It's this information gap that Australia is trying to address through its new Developer Rating Scheme (DRS). Launched in March 2026, the voluntary scheme aims to provide communities and landholders with greater transparency about the companies developing renewable energy, storage and transmission projects.
While still in its early stages, it raises an interesting question for the UK: could providing communities with better information about developers help increase trust and support?
The DRS was one of the key recommendations from the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner's 2023 Community Engagement Review, which explored the challenges facing community engagement in the renewable energy transition. One of the review's key observations was that ‘poor engagement practices experienced by landholders and community members have led to a material distrust of project developers’.
Communities may be asked to host major infrastructure projects without having any easy way to determine whether a developer has a strong record of community engagement, financial resilience or successful project delivery.
The Australian government's response was to create a voluntary national developer rating scheme, independently administered by Equifax (a global data, analytics and technology company) to provide a consistent and transparent assessment of participating developers.
The DRS assesses renewable energy developers and transmission companies on their performance, track record and capability against seven broad criteria. These criteria are aimed at providing an assessment of a developer's organisational capability, governance and approach to delivering renewable energy projects. They include:
The detailed methodology for assessment has been published by Equifax. In summary, each of these overarching themes are made up of a series of individual assessment criteria. The assessment draws on company evidence, project documentation, financial information and publicly available records to build an overall picture of organisational performance. Importantly, not all criteria carry the same weight, with greater emphasis being given to community engagement, reflecting the scheme's objective of improving trust and social licence for renewable energy development.
Individual criteria are scored and weighted before being combined into an overall assessment, with developers then being benchmarked against organisations of a similar size. While developers receive a detailed assessment across all seven areas, the public-facing element is much simpler: a Community Engagement Rating awards participating developers between three and five stars, based on the maturity of their engagement practices. The detailed scoring given to the developer provides feedback to support continuous improvement.
Participation in the scheme is voluntary, with developers choosing whether to be assessed and funding their own accreditation.
While the methodology is comprehensive, it also illustrates one of the challenges of measuring trust. Community engagement is assessed using a maturity model, rewarding increasingly sophisticated approaches to engagement throughout the project lifecycle. However, some developers I spoke to questioned whether even a detailed framework can fully capture the quality of relationships that are often built over many years and are highly dependent on local context.
Participation is also voluntary, which means the information available to communities may only ever provide part of the picture. Some developers may decide not to participate because of the cost of accreditation, while others may simply prefer not to be assessed in case they fail to achieve the highest rating. If participation remains limited, communities may still struggle to compare developers consistently.
There are also broader questions to consider about governance, such as can something as nuanced as community engagement really be represented by a single score? and how should ratings be updated as companies improve, or fail to improve, their performance?
The UK faces many of the same challenges that Australia has been grappling with.
As renewable energy deployment continues to accelerate, particularly with the future introduction of the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan (SSEP), communities will increasingly encounter developers with varying levels of experience, capability and commitment to engagement. While many developers invest heavily in building strong community relationships, there is currently no straightforward way for communities to distinguish between organisations with different track records.
Whether the UK needs a formal developer rating scheme is an open question. It would not eliminate disagreement about individual projects; however, it could help address a genuine information imbalance by giving communities and landowners greater visibility of a developer's experience, governance and previous performance.
At the same time, any UK scheme would need to carefully consider how performance is measured. Community engagement is highly relational and context-specific – a simple score may never fully capture what good engagement looks like in practice. It would also need to consider how new entrants to the market are treated.
Australia's Developer Rating Scheme may or may not prove to be the right solution – it's too early to judge. However, for me, the bigger takeaway from looking at this scheme isn't the rating system itself, but the focus on building trust and transparency.
Australia has recognised that community trust doesn't just happen, it requires investment, transparency and institutions that help communities navigate increasingly complex infrastructure decisions.
That doesn't necessarily mean the UK should introduce a similar scheme. There may be other ways of achieving the same objective in the short term. For me, priority actions for the UK government should be:
One lesson from my Churchill Fellowship has become abundantly clear: if governments want to accelerate the energy transition, they need to invest not only in physical infrastructure, but also in infrastructure for trust. If you'd like to discuss these ideas in more detail, please reach out to me at rwindemer@regen.co.uk.
