{"id":11659,"date":"2021-01-22T11:45:05","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T11:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=153409"},"modified":"2021-01-22T11:45:05","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T11:45:05","slug":"we-need-to-build-a-lot-of-wind-turbines-will-americans-agree-to-live-near-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/22\/we-need-to-build-a-lot-of-wind-turbines-will-americans-agree-to-live-near-them\/","title":{"rendered":"We need to build a lot of wind turbines. Will Americans agree to live near them?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Late last year, Princeton researchers released a major study<\/a> modeling different ways<\/a> the U.S. could reduce its net emissions to zero by 2050 \u2014 a target that has been advanced by scientists, and countries around the world, as our best hope for limiting the worst effects of climate change. The models were designed to prioritize cost-effectiveness, and the researchers found that the U.S. could in fact achieve net-zero by 2050 without spending much more of our gross domestic product on energy than we do today. But that finding came with several caveats, including the warning that \u201cexpansive impacts on landscapes and communities\u201d will have to be \u201cmitigated and managed to secure broad social license.\u201d<\/p>\n Put more bluntly, a lot more Americans are going to have to get on board with having renewable energy infrastructure like wind farms in their neighborhoods. The researchers estimate that we\u2019ll need to devote between 93,000 and 400,000 square miles of land to wind farms in order to meet that net-zero goal. While the wind turbines\u2019 direct<\/em> footprint would only be about 1 percent of those figures, their visual<\/em> footprint \u2014 the area throughout which you would likely be able to see the turbines \u2014 could be as big as Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas combined. The study calls \u201ccommunity opposition to visual and land-use impacts of wind\u201d a \u201cpotential bottleneck deserving immediate attention.\u201d<\/p>\n Community opposition is already a major<\/a> obstacle<\/a> to the development of wind farms. Despite national polls<\/a> that indicate that wind energy has broad social license to expand, local battles still slow projects down, drive up their costs, and in some cases, kill them altogether. To address this bottleneck, policymakers might turn to social scientists, who have spent decades<\/a> trying to untangle the complex dynamics that go into how communities respond to these projects. Recent findings could help planners predict where wind projects might be more welcome, and where they might need to do more work (or spend more money) to earn community support.<\/p>\n The first thing to understand about community opposition to wind is that it\u2019s not just a matter of NIMBYism, the idea that people might support wind energy in general but selfishly don\u2019t want it in their backyard. \u201cResearchers have looked into that question in particular,\u201d said Joe Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, \u201cand said you know what, there are legitimate reasons why people are concerned. There\u2019s meat and the bones of why there could be opposition.\u201d<\/p>\n Past case studies and surveys have tied opposition to the perception within a community of unfair or nontransparent decision making, and to a lack of a clear benefit to the community for hosting the project. The implication is that opposition can be warded off or ameliorated if developers consult with communities early and often in the process and work out local \u201cco-benefits\u201d such as jobs, energy bill credits, investments in schools or roads, or even co-ownership.<\/p>\n And yet it\u2019s not that simple. Sarah Mills, a researcher at the University of Michigan, has watched as proposed wind farms in Michigan that seemed in many ways identical \u2014 the same developer, the same permitting procedures, similar lease agreements with local landowners \u2014 were met with very different reactions. \u201cIt\u2019s super contentious in one community and not contentious in another community,\u201d Mills said. \u201cMy sense was that there was something underlyingly different about those places.\u201d<\/p>\n She and her colleague Douglas Bessette recently investigated whether certain characteristics of a community might predict how a wind project will be received independently of developer practices and permitting processes.<\/p>\n \u201cUnderstanding whether it\u2019s different individuals within a community or different communities themselves \u2026 which are more willing to accept this kind of infrastructure and which are not, I think, is going to help align future policies,\u201d Mills said.<\/p>\n Limiting their study to four Midwestern states \u2014 Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, and Indiana \u2014 Bessette and Mills made a list of wind farms and asked local energy professionals to rate on a scale of 0 to 10 how contentious the project had been prior to its construction. Then they weighed those scores against a wide range of public data, including population density, political affiliation, educational attainment, the size and other characteristics of farms in the area, and the presence of scenic features on the landscape, looking for correlations.<\/p>\n