Testing the Correlation between Prior Knowledge of - and Visualisation Guided WTPs for Reducing the Visual Impacts Visual from Offshore Wind Farms

Abstract

Visual external costs are significant elements in the cost-benefit analysis of wind farm locations. This has been demonstrated well in the literature. However, in the assessment of the visual costs, a large share of the earlier studies used no or only simplistic visualizations of the visual impacts at stake. The cost estimates thus rely on the respondents' ability to imagine the visual impacts associated with wind turbines of different sizes and at different locations. This has been argued to potentially reduce the validity of the visual cost estimates. The present paper analyzes whether respondents' prior perceptions of the visual impacts from offshore wind farms correlate with their stated preferences for reducing the same visual impacts from offshore wind farms, when presented with visualizations of the visual impacts. The results show that respondents who perceive offshore wind farms to have positive or neutral visual impacts express equally strong preferences and high positive willingness to pay for reducing visual impacts, compared to respondents who perceive the visual impacts to be negative. The information in the visualizations thus appears to have updated the prior perception of the visual impacts of offshore wind farms.