The cultural barriers to renewable energy and energy efficiency in the United States

By Benjamin Sovacool. 2009

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In an effort to make the social dimensions of energy conversion and use more visible, this article investigates the cultural barriers to energy efficiency technologies and devices and renewable power generators in the United States. To discover the cultural impediments to these technologies, the author conducted 181 formal, semi-structured interviews at more than 82 institutions (including electric utilities, regulatory agencies, interest groups, energy systems manufacturers, nonprofit organizations, consulting firms, universities, national laboratories, and state institutions) from 2005 to 2008. These interviews were supplemented with an extensive literature review. The study finds that the apparent disconnect between how electricity is made and how it is socially perceived perpetuates public apathy and misinformation about it; also that deeply held values related to consumption, abundance, trust, control, and freedom shape American attitudes toward energy. As a result, wind farms and solar panels (along with other renewable power systems) are often opposed not because they are a poor alternative to fossil fuels, but because people simply do not comprehend why such technologies may be needed.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41eea477a4ce0390e9d269db49bb81e870142933

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Pollution

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Review of barriers to the dissemination of decentralized renewable energy systems (2016, background): “In USA, psychological attributes such as comfort, freedom, control, trust, social status, ritual, and habit are reportedly impeding the diffusion of DRES in the country (Sovacool, 2009).”
Definitions and dimensions of energy security: a literature review (2018, background): “For example, cultural barriers to utilize new technologies can make them useless.(172) In addition, nuclear energy and nuclear proliferation brought a huge risk to the system as its negative impacts on the society and on the environment concern many.”
Spatializing energy justice (2017, background): “Moving beyond this context, there is evidence to suggest that energy poverty might be especially stigmatizing in nations such as the United States, where relatively high levels of energy consumption are often expected and normal (Sovacool, 2009), or in Scandinavian countries where having a warm and ”
Designing an Energy Literacy Questionnaire for Middle and High School Youth (2013, background): “E-mail: dewaters@clarkson.edu adequate information as well as a general misunderstanding of external costs associated with fossil fuel resources (Sovacool, 2009a, 2009b).”