How stable are preferences among emerging electricity generation technologies

Abstract

Coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), natural-gas-fired power plants with CCS, and Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are potentially important emerging energy technologies that could help mitigate climate change and contribute to a low-carbon future. Public opinion and preferences towards these technologies will affect their adoption when they are technologically ready to be implemented. This study examines the nature and stability of public preferences among these options. We find that participants have internally consistent preferences, when tested in several ways. Overall, they prefer SMRs to natural gas with CCS to coal with CCS. On a group level, these preferences depend on the choice alternatives, but not on how fully the technologies are described nor how far away a hypothetical power plant would be sited. On the individual level, preferences are related to participants' perceptions of the technology and their political ideology. Our findings suggest that presenting the three technologies together will produce the most balanced, informed judgment, with the least influence of political ideology.

Informed Citizen Panels on the Swiss Electricity Mix 2035: Longer-Term Evolution of Citizen Preferences and Affect in Two Cities

“…However, more conventional informational tools like written factsheets also prove to be very effective for information [70,71]. Recent studies concluded that citizens could be able to extract information better from short written texts than from an interactive tool [72] or from long text [29]. In our case, group discussions and interactive tools required particular involvement, likely leading to stable deeper value-based perspectives [12].…”

“…This indicates that information has a stronger effect before people form strong preferences and feelings about the technologies and that already determined preferences and affect about a technology are harder to change. Previous studies support this argument [9,29,41,67,68]. Over the longer term, the technology preferences that changed with information did not return to the initial preferences (except woody biomass), indicating a lasting influence of information.…”

Risk heatmaps as visual displays: Opening movie studios after the COVID‐19 shutdown

“…Respondents were asked for their year of birth, racial/ethnic background, sex, education level, household income, color blindness, living environment, number of people they encounter daily, and political affiliation. We administered a four-item test of subjective numeracy, asking them to rate themselves on a 1-6 scale for how well they could calculate a 15% tip, read graphs, maps, and instruction manuals, following Fagerlin et al (2007) and Yang et al (2022). Cronbach's test of reliability for the subjective numeracy questions found a reliability of α = 0.834, which is considered a good value and very similar to the results reported in Fagerlin et al (2007).…”