The implementation of many small power stations compensates the closing of powerful large power plants as part of the German Energy Transition is compensated. It is unclear how site decisions are made, which actors are involved, and which economic, ecological, and social consequences occur. The quantitative study consists of a written postal survey of renewable energy plant operators, concerning central aspects of project development. The study found strong regional disparities concerning the entrepreneurial behavior of plant operators of renewable energies, a low importance of socio-institutional and socio-cultural parameters, a great relevance of micro-social environment during site planning of renewable energy plants, and that plant operators are highly influenced by economic and individual desires. It may be concluded that the perspectives operators have on the Energy Transitions must be more systematically included into the discourse regarding the sustainable deployment of renewable energies, as they reveal significant disparities with topics that are emphasized by the public (e.g., landscape aesthetic, citizens’ participation). It was shown that the challenges and problems that arise in the context of regional energy transformation cannot be generalized beyond regional circumstances; rather, they must be regarded as specific regional phenomena that have to be overcome by means of regionally adapted energy concepts.
In this paper we present a realization of the informationbottleneck-paradigm by means of an improved counter propagation network. It combines an unsupervised vector quantizer for data compression with a subsequent supervised learning vector quantization model. The approach is mathematically justified and yields an interpretable model for classification under the constraint of data compression, which is not longer independently learned from the classification task.* M.K., M.M.B. and D.S. were supported by grants of the European Social Fund (ESF) for a Young Researcher Group 'MaLeKITA' and a PhD grant.
Abstract. The number of actors in the German Energy Transition as
well as the planning complexity increases and new spatial implications
emerge in contrast to the conventional energy system. In planning processes
for Renewable Energy Technologies mostly economic approaches are chosen, but
simultaneously the number of social conflicts related to wind power plants
or solar energy plants is on an all-time high. The aim of the study is
therefore to identify the essential parameters of a sustainable expansion of
renewable energies from the diversity of potential influencing factors and
to illustrate them using a regional case study and GIS. The analyses reveal
the great regional assertiveness of photovoltaics, whereby wind energy can
assert itself due to social parameters also at some locations. Beyond this,
it is to be stated that renewable energies find themselves in intense
economic and social competition for space, although the most compatible
spatial solutions have not always been able to prevail so far. Nevertheless,
the presented approach offers a sophisticated method to minimize the social
conflicts that arise in the context of the energy system transformation.
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