Nearshore Wind Resistance on Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island

Abstract

The Danish island Samsø is world-famous as Denmark's Renewable Energy Island. 21 wind turbines supply the island's electricity. Today, public hostility toward a projected nearshore wind farm off the island's preserved northern coast is growing. This paper takes its main theoretical cue from Gomart and Hajer's (2003) call to open up political questions to empirical inquiry and to pay attention to the material settings in which political questions unfold. The paper seeks to make sense of the islanders' unexpected opposition to a new wind farm, and it does so through a critique of the unexperimental and depoliticizing attitude -found in the empirical case as well as in some academic scholarship -of the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) logic. Replacing the NIMBY logic of closing down deliberation with an empirical and 'cosmopolitical' (Stengers, 2005) approach to open up the space of politics to close investigation, the paper focuses on the empirical settings which give the controversy its specifi c shape and asks how the projected wind farm is interrogated, negotiated and recast as it travels through the socio-material politics of the wind controversy.

Effects of trust and public participation on acceptability of renewable energy projects in the Netherlands and China

“…Moreover, rather than focusing on a specific energy technology, our aim was to test the theoretical model on the effects of trust and influence over decisions on project acceptability. Future research could test whether similar results are found when studying more controversial renewable energy projects, such as wind power projects, or hydro-energy projects [6,8,53]. Maybe when project acceptability is generally lower, having only high trust or influence over major decisions regarding the project is not sufficient to increase project acceptability -in such cases, both may be needed for higher project acceptability.…”

“…Interestingly, acceptability was even higher when people had influence over major decisions, irrespective of the level of trust that people had in the responsible energy company in China. 8…”

“…One key challenge is public acceptability of renewable energy projects, namely the extent to which the public evaluates a renewable energy project favourably or unfavourably. Many renewable energy projects face public resistance, which can seriously inhibit the implementation of those projects [5][6][7][8]. This study aimed to further our understanding of what influences public acceptability of renewable energy projects.…”

Public participation in decision making on sustainable energy transitions

“…We define public acceptability of renewable energy projects as the extent to which people evaluate those projects (un)favourably (from now on referred to as "project acceptability"). Indeed, renewable energy projects may be delayed or cancelled if there is strong public resistance (Boyd, 2017;Papazu, 2017;Shaw et al, 2015). Hence, an important question is which factors and processes affect project acceptability.…”

“…One key challenge is public acceptability of renewable energy projects, namely the extent to which the public evaluates a renewable energy project favourably or unfavourably. Many renewable energy projects face public resistance, which can seriously inhibit the implementation of those projects (Devine-Wright, 2007, 2009Guo et al, 2015;Papazu, 2017). This study aims to further our understanding of what influences public acceptability of renewable energy projects.…”