Public acceptance of renewable electricity generation and transmission network developments: Insights from Ireland

Manuel Tong Koecklin, Genaro Longoria, Desta Z. Fitiwi, Joseph F. DeCarolis and John Curtis

Energy Policy, 2021, vol. 151, issue C

Abstract: This paper analyses how people’s attitudes towards onshore wind power and overhead transmission lines affect the cost-optimal development of electricity generation mixes, under a high renewable energy policy. A power systems generation and transmission expansion planning model is used for the analysis, combined with a novel additional modelling constraint incorporating public acceptance of energy infrastructure. In the scenarios examined the least cost solutions increase by as much as 33% compared to a base case where the constraint on public acceptance of energy infrastructure is excluded. In the most extreme public acceptance scenario considered, the greatest share of additional costs (>80%) is related to value of lost load, while additional investment and operational costs associated with public acceptance constraints for new energy infrastructure are between 5–6% of base case costs. The results are indicative of the cost that power systems face in reflecting the public’s preferences for new energy infrastructure in generation and grid expansion planning. Power system modelling that ignores the public’s acceptance of new energy infrastructure may offer generation or transmission pathways that are likely to be sub-optimal in practice.

Keywords: Generation expansion planning; Electricity generation mix; Renewable integration; Electric transmission lines; Public acceptance; Least-cost optimisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521000549
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:151:y:2021:i:c:s0301421521000549

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2021.112185

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().