Quantifying Public Preferences for Community-Based Renewable Energy Projects in South Korea

Abstract

Under the new climate regime, renewable energy (RE) has received particular attention for mitigating the discharge of greenhouse gas. According to the third energy master plan in South Korea, by 2040, 30–35% of the energy demand must met with RE sources. To ensure relevant policy design to achieve this goal, it is crucial to analyze the public’s willingness to accept community-based RE projects. This study conducted a nationwide survey to understand the opinion of the public and also that of local inhabitants living near a RE project. A choice experiment was employed to measure public preferences toward RE projects. The analysis reveals that the type of energy source, distance to a residential area, and annual percentage incentives could affect acceptance levels. Additionally, investment levels were a factor in local inhabitants’ acceptance of energy-related projects. This study presents the relevant policy implications in accordance with the analysis results.

Humanitarian and Developmental Research Engagement during COVID-19

“…The goal of CBCA is to determine which combination of limited number of attributes is the most influential on respondent choice or decision-making. The combination of limited number of attributes is usually presented in either a 'table' or a 'catalogue' format (Mansuy, Verlinde, & Macharis, 2020;Tanujaya et al, 2020). Participants must choose only one option based on preferable attributes, typically by answering a question similar to 'if these were the only options, which one would you prefer?…”

“…Lee, Huh & Yoo (2018) used CBCA to investigate the value given by people to the attributes of the installation of small-scale solar power plants in South Social Science Protocols, December 2021, 1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.7565/ssp.v4.6487 7 Korea. Tanujaya et al (2020) used this method to understand and measure the opinion of the public and local inhabitants living near renewable energy projects in South Korea.…”

“…It is used frequently in testing customer acceptance of new product designs/prototypes (Lee, Huh & Yoo, 2018). It is suitable for gathering information for the optimization of existing or developing products (Mansuy, Verlinde & Macharis, 2020;Tanujaya et al, 2020). It is a preferred technique for cross-country and cross-community analysis (Ebers et al, 2017;Tanujaya et al, 2020), and there is a growing interest in using CBCA in health policy and planning studies in low-income countries (Mangham, Hanson & McPake, 2009;Spilker et al, 2020).…”

Rural Public Acceptance of Wind and Solar Energy: A Case Study from Mersing, Malaysia

“…For several nations, societal recognition of RE is especially essential to policymakers who push for a quick introduction of RE technology to reduce climate change [43,44]. Wolsink [45] describes RE's social acceptance as "accepting all related participants in a society, which means a much wider and conceptually distinctive context than pure recognition by the public".…”

Energy Supply Preferences as Multicriteria Decision Problems: Developing a System of Criteria from Survey Data

“…The most important questions in our survey are in line with the topics of international surveys that often include the ranking of energy supply alternatives [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] or the rating of certain evaluation criteria [19][20][21][22][23]; however, our survey stands out with higher complexity. The enhanced complexity of the survey is due to separation of heat and electricity supply that implied separate evaluations:…”