General information
Code: J5-9348
Period: 1.7.2018 - 30.6.2020
Range on year: 0.43 FTE | 2020
Project leader at FDV: viš.znan.sod.dr. Slavko Kurdija
Research activity: Social sciences
Abstract
Political agreements and severity of climate change predictions call for urgent improvement of energy production and use. Amongst the many measures to address this problem, one of the most perspective besides consumption decrease is also increase in share of energy produced from renewable energy sources (RES). While technological progress is swift, political support high and market conditions relatively favourable, RES use implementation faced considerable social opposition. The public generally supports increase in use of RES but finds concrete projects unacceptable. Research shows that main reason for opposition stems from changes and impacts on landscape and distributions of benefits and damages, perceived as unjust by local communities. The proposed project addresses this issue with an interdisciplinary contextualized approach on multiple levels. Setting EU and Slovenia’s RES targets as our basis, we will construct scenarios of reaching them by combining different RES technologies. For each scenario will design a spatial model, showing the most appropriate areas in Slovenia to implement those RES facilities. We will choose reference areas for which visualizations will be made to show landscape consequences of the implementation. This will allow us to link together national targets, which generally have high public support, with concrete local consequences of achieving them, which often evoke opposition. Social acceptability of scenarios, spatial models and visualizations will be explored using a public opinion survey conducted on a representative sample. We will also include various compensations and ownership schemes of RES facilities, which were shown to have a beneficial effect on social acceptability. We will employ focus groups to further study the results of the survey in order to better understand motivation for (un)acceptance. Survey and focus group findings will explain the relative importance of landscape and economic factors for social acceptability as well as reveal the socially most acceptable scenario. By understanding the publics value system we will also be able to improve the spatial models. Results will be gathered in recommendations for ensuring higher social acceptance of RES facilities, paying special attention to impacts of compensations and ownership. They will also reveal in which landscape types the use of RES and which technology is most acceptable to the public. Using the described approach we will address some of the key questions in the research of social aspects of energy transition. We will link together acceptability on multiple levels, test effects of compensation and ownership and connect the perception of national RES targets and local consequences of their fulfilment. Besides the crucial knowledge for development of RES in Slovenia, this will also bring together issues that are mostly studied separately and set a common framework to ground existing research in a common perspective.
Research Organisation
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/17338
Researchers
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/17338
Citations for bibliographic records
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/17338
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