Grabbing the wind? Assetisation of land and enclosure of wind rights in the Outer Hebrides

Abstract This paper explores how land gains momentum as a contested resource for wind farm developments by disentangling intertwined processes of ‘wind grabbing’; that is, the processes of appropriating land for obtaining rights to utilise and capture value from wind energy. Based on empirical insights from territorial struggles over the development of rival wind farm projects in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, the paper sheds critical light on the relationship between ‘wind rights’ (i.e., entitlements to utilise and benefit from wind energy) and the enclosure of wind by landownership, and discusses how historical landownership structures are called into question by community wind energy projects. In doing so, we expand on the underlying processes and consequences of wind grabbing by bringing questions of landownership and wind rights into dialogue with concepts of assetisation, enclosure, value grabbing and territorial alienation that have recently emerged at the margins of critical energy geography. Although the possibility of utilising and capitalising wind energy revalorises land in the first place, drawing on these concepts helps explore the functionality of wind grabbing by revealing the significance of land and landownership in making wind investable, controlling wind resources, extracting value from wind energy, and excluding others from the productive use of wind. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the mobilisation of land as an increasingly contested resource for the deployment of energy infrastructures and the possibility of severing land rights from wind rights need to be critically considered as fundamental conditions that determine the distribution of benefits from the commodification of renewable energy resources.