The European research project REALISEGRID: Transmission planning issues and methodological approach towards the optimal development of the pan-European system

Reducing or fostering public opposition? A critical reflection on the neutrality of pan-European cost–benefit analysis in electricity transmission planning

“…Today, CBA is the main tool for public project appraisal throughout Europe and the world [25], and is widely considered as an elegant, objective and transparent tool to provide robust support for governmental decisions and, ultimately, an instrument to overcome 'subjective decision making' [27,[32][33][34]. Consequently, there is broad experience with CBA, for example, for environmental regulation [30,35,36], transport [25] health [37] and energy [16,38].…”

“…This is followed by the spatial planning phase wherein Source: Adapted from [17]. See also [16,[38][39][40] for a detailed description of the process; see [41] for a generic CBA description. usually the regional planning authority together with the TSO decide where to build the power line.…”

“…society) point of view' [16] and to 'tackle the endemic dissent attitude manifested by the public opinion, often unilaterally polarised by environmentalists' [17].…”

“…Whether it is suitable to reduce public opposition is a different matter, and for this it is useful to pay attention to what a CBA really means. The fundamental assumption of the EC [12], ENTSO-E [15], and related research [16][17][18] is that the pan-European transmission CBA will provide objective information that can neutrally inform stakeholders about the costs and benefits of action and inaction, thereby helping reduce stakeholders' opposition to transmission projects.…”

“…We thus provide a critical reflection on the usefulness of CBA in European transmission grid planning in order to address our main research question: can the pan-European CBA, as suggested, for instance, by ENTSO-E [15] and related research articles [16,18], generate unbiased information for transmission grid planning and neutrally inform stakeholders of costs and benefits in order to reduce public opposition? We define unbiased information as one that is 'non-policy prescriptive concerning disputed values and interests in a respective political realm' [53].…”