Acceptance of wind power development and exposure – Not-in-anybody’s-backyard

Abstract

Despite a large stated-preference (SP) literature on wind power externalities, few SP studies employ a case-control approach to examine whether people’s acceptance of new wind power developments and renewable energy initiatives increases or decreases with exposure. Furthermore, the existing studies are inconclusive on this issue. In a case-control discrete choice experiment, we measure the level of acceptance in terms of people’s willingness-to-accept (WTA) for having future land-based wind power developments in Norway; comparing exposed and non-exposed people’s WTA. We find that exposure lowers acceptance. Furthermore, exposed people are also unwilling to pay as much to increase general domestic renewable energy production (from all sources) as non-exposed people, and thus have lower acceptance for such renewable energy policy initiatives. After testing for type of exposure, we argue that the inconclusiveness in the literature of how exposure affects acceptance of wind power developments could be due to the fact that impacts considered differ somewhat across studies.