The role of community acceptance in planning outcomes for onshore wind and solar farms: An energy justice analysis

Energy justice in the transition to low carbon energy systems: Exploring key themes in interdisciplinary research

“…More recent scholarship in environment [52,53], energy [54,55] and climate justice [56,57] The set of papers demonstrates the unwavering commitment of justice scholarship to quantitative (social) research design and application. We find a range of large and small scale survey-based approaches designed to explore the effectiveness of planning processes [58], social acceptability and transactions costs [59] or a comprehensive analysis of energy user experiences [60]. There are also more radical alternative quantitative assessments that examine the full costs associated with renewable and non-renewable energy sources [48,61].…”

“…Interviews and ethnographic field work has been combined with quantitative household surveys [68]. Mixed methods offer a research design that allows different methods to be applied to one or more case studies in order to study an issue from several perspectives [58].…”

“…The justice question is often reduced to the extent to which developers have successfully imposed or convinced a local community to accept both the positives and negatives of a given project. Roddis et al [58] analyse the effect that community acceptance has had on planning applications for onshore wind and solar farms in Great Britain between 1990-2017 by compiling a set of indicators for community acceptance. They investigate the relative importance of 12 statistically significant variables finding that the visual impact of low carbon infrastructure projects is of course important.…”

Harmonised global datasets of wind and solar farm locations and power

“…At the global scale, a recent study used human influence as a proxy for where energy generation is occurring 11 . Both approaches are likely insufficient, as two UK-based studies showed that when location data are available, a variety of socioeconomic factors affect the siting of wind turbines and solar PV 17,18 . Sufficient location data would allow researchers to interrogate the socioeconomic drivers of renewable energy infrastructure siting at a global scale to produce probability surfaces for energy development 19 .…”

Designing local renewable energy communities to increase social acceptance: Evidence from a choice experiment in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland

“…However, public acceptance and participation in local energy communities is not limited to the acceptance of one specific energy technology or installation, but to the acceptance of all administrative and technological elements needed for a sufficient local energy system. While numerous analyses deal with the acceptance of specific technologies (Paravantis et al, 2018;Roddis et al, 2018;Sposato and Hampl, 2018;Sovacool and Lakshmi Ratan, 2012;Yuan et al, 2011), or optimizing administrative frameworks for energy communities (Baruah and Enweremadu, 2019;Horbach and Rammer, 2018;Khan et al, 2018), existing research lacks comprehensive acceptance assessments of the entirety of local energy systems rather than just their elements. In addition to the underrepresentation of a system-level perspective in acceptance research, some promising emerging technologies are not found in previous studies.…”