Co-production in distributed generation: renewable energy and creating space for fitting infrastructure within landscapes

Abstract

This review describes the infrastructural elements of the socio-technical system of power supply based on renewables and the role of landscape concerns in decision-making about emerging 'intelligent grids' . The considerable land areas required for energy infrastructure call for sizable 'distributed generation' close to energy consumption. Securing community acceptance of renewables' infrastructure, perceived impacts on the community, and 'landscape justice' requires two types of co-production: in power supply and in making space available. With co-production, landscape issues are prominent, for some options dominant. However, 'objectification' of landscape, such as the use of 'visibility' as proxy for 'visual impact' , is part of lingering centralised and hierarchical approaches to the deployment of renewables. Institutional tendencies of centralisation and hierarchy, in power supply management as well as in siting, should be replaced by coproduction, as follows from common pool resources theory. Co-production is the key to respecting landscape values, furthering justice, and achieving community acceptance.

Acceptability of innovative biomass heating plants in a German case study—a contribution to cultural landscape management and local energy supply

“…Within this process, an active reflection on the issue within its context and interaction with others and social norms are required [25]. Acceptability studies should involve context factors, such as institutional settings and fairness of the process, system thinking, and the consideration of socio-technical regimes [16]. The present paper focuses on the acceptability decisions that are made by farmers at an early stage in the innovation process (cf.…”

“…At the same time, market acceptance is more than a mere market-based assessment by farmers. Due to its relation to visions of landscape development and conservation, market acceptance also contains elements of "community acceptance", where opinions and judgements of local stakeholders and end users on site-specific renewable energy projects and institutional settings play a major role [16,31]. Regarding the acceptability degrees, we want to pay special attention to temporary and inconclusive decisions, the so-called doubt or conditional acceptance [32], and to "rejection" or "non-use" of innovations [25,33].…”

“…Hence, this innovative use of residuals for bioenergy production can potentially contribute to both suitable cultural landscape management and a decentralised energy supply. In particular, decentralisation is an important topic in recent energy transition debates all over the world [16]. The regional level is seen as decisive for the success of national energy transitions, such as the "German Energiewende" [17,18].…”

Climate adaptation, urban regeneration and brownfield reclamation: a literature review on landscape quality in large-scale transformation projects

“…Large-scale interventions are featured in these studies from a strategic planning and design perspective, which involves longterm processes of change and vision development (Kempenaar & Van den Brink, 2018). Publications on the operational design of renewable energy landscapes, where the change in landscape quality becomes tangible (Wolsink, 2017), tend to focus on experience and preserving scenic values-a single aspect of landscape quality (e.g. Apostol et al, 2017).…”

Understanding the spatial unevenness of regional renewable energy deployment: insights for policy design

“…Secondly, energy systems are also shaped by complex interactions between social and political factors; in particular, a rich body of research has been devoted to understand how actors and social networks shape and in uence transition processes (Farla et al, 2012). Thirdly, the spatially extensive nature of many RE technologies has long been recognised as creating challenges in reconciling them with other land uses and values (Bridge, 2018;Wolsink, 2017;Walker, 1995). These contributions suggest that we need deeper insights into the wider social and geographical contexts of how and where renewable technologies are or might be deployed, and into the factors and policy strategies that promote or hinder their deployment.…”