Designing local renewable energy communities to increase social acceptance: Evidence from a choice experiment in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland
By Valeriya Azarova, Jed J. Cohen, Christina Friedl, Johannes Reichl. Energy Policy, 2019
188 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Resistance of the local population to new energy infrastructure may hinder achieving the European Union's goal that 32% of energy consumption come from renewable sources. A vast literature is available on the social acceptance of specific renewable energy technologies, but existing research lacks assessments regarding comprehensive transformations to local energy systems. Moreover, the promising energy storage technology power-to-gas has not yet been addressed in acceptance studies. This paper fills these gaps by analysing data from a choice experiment survey with 2000 respondents across four nations (Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland). Results from the analysis show that solar farms and power-to-gas infrastructure increase acceptance of local energy communities, while wind farms have an ambiguous effect, and gas power plants and power lines decrease acceptance. The derived monthly willingness to pay estimates for the acceptance-increasing technologies ranges from 8.5€ for power-to-gas to 29.5€ for photovoltaics. Additionally, we investigate whether stated support from political opinion leaders at the local, national, and EU levels can increase the acceptance of renewable energy systems. Results suggest that Italian choices are influenced by the opinions of EU and national governmental bodies (+3.5% and +2.7%), and that Swiss choices are sensitive to the opinions of local politicians (+2.3%).
Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ef602c6a8cc1d2966f598985f554c3be1f8511e
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Analyzing Similarities between the European Union Countries in Terms of the Structure and Volume of Energy Production from Renewable Energy Sources (2020, background): “In the previous studies on renewable energy sources, reference was mainly made to their technical [42], ecological [43] economical [44] and social [45] aspects.”