Abstract
The deployment of renewable technologies as part of climate mitigation strategies have provoked a range of responses from various actors, bringing public acceptance to the forefront of energy debates. A key example is the reaction of communities when renewable projects are proposed in their local areas. This paper analyses the effect that community acceptance has had on planning applications for onshore wind and solar farms in Great Britain between 1990 and 2017. It does this by compiling a set of indicators for community acceptance and testing their association with planning outcomes using binomial logistic regression. It identifies 12 variables with statistically significant effects: 4 for onshore wind, 4 for solar farms, and 4 spanning both. For both technologies, the visibility of a project, its installed capacity, the social deprivation of the area, and the year of the application are significant. The paper draws conclusions from these results for community acceptance and energy justice, and discusses the implications for energy decision-making.
Highlights
The deployment of renewable energy technologies as part of the transition to a low carbon economy has provoked a broad range of responses from a variety of actors, bringing issues of ‘public acceptance’ to the forefront of energy debates [1,2,3]
More variables in the ‘material arguments’ category were significant than those in the ‘attitudinal/social influences’ category across both technologies, aesthetic variables. This indicates that aesthetics and visual impacts are strongly associated with planning outcomes for both onshore wind and solar farms, which is in line with much of the existing literature on public acceptance of these technologies
This paper investigates the effect of community acceptance on planning applications for onshore wind and planning applications for solar farms in Great Britain (GB) between 1990 and 2017
Summary
The deployment of renewable energy technologies as part of the transition to a low carbon economy has provoked a broad range of responses from a variety of actors, bringing issues of ‘public acceptance’ to the forefront of energy debates [1,2,3]. Energy policies and projects have proceeded despite strong negative public reactions, such as large-scale hydropower projects in environmentally sensitive areas of Brazil and China [6], fracking for shale gas in the UK [7], and controversial coal mining projects in Australia [8]. This raises empirical and ethical questions about the role(s) that public acceptance can, does and should play in formulating energy policy and informing energy deployment. Despite some recent academic attention (e.g. [20]) the distributive elements of renewable energy development have been relatively overlooked, perhaps because it is often regarded uncritically as an environmental and social good
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