What Drives People’s Opinions of Electricity Infrastructure? Empirical Evidence from Ireland

Valentin Bertsch (), Marie Hyland () and Michael Mahony

No WP545, Papers from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)

Abstract: Across the EU, significant infrastructure investment is needed in both generation from renewable energy sources (RES) and the electricity transmission system to meet the European targets on emission reduction and RES expansion. Experiences show, however, that citizens may object to new energy infrastructure in their localities which may cause delays in achieving the targets. To avoid such delays, it is crucial to understand what drives people’s opinions. To explore people’s opinions of different electricity generation and transmission technologies in Ireland, we conducted a nationally-representative survey. Concerning the drivers, we explicitly distinguish between socio-demographics, socio-psychological/political beliefs, and contextual/local factors. Our results show that people generally have positive views of RES technologies. While this indicates that Irish citizens agree with the move towards cleaner electricity sources, we find a reluctance amongst people to have these technologies located close to their homes. As for the drivers, we find that the respondents’ socio-psychological and political beliefs are generally more important than most socio-demographics in driving their opinions and their tendency to oppose infrastructure development locally. This finding underlines the relevance for policy makers to understand which objectives people consider most important and how these judgements are related to their opinions of different energy technologies.

Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-eur and nep-reg
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.esri.ie/pubs/WP545.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (https://www.esri.ie/pubs/WP545.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.esri.ie/system/files?file=media/file-uploads/2016-10/WP545.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What drives people's opinions of electricity infrastructure? Empirical evidence from Ireland (2017)
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:esr:wpaper:wp545

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Burns ().