Research

Public acceptance of renewable energies and energy autonomy: A comparative study in the French, German and Swiss Upper Rhine region

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Abstract

In the context of climate change mitigation and increasing decentralized generation of energy from renewable sources, public acceptance of renewable energy (RE) has become an important issue in energy research. Many studies have addressed public acceptance through a case-based empirical lens with rather specific conclusions for individual technologies in a given context. This paper draws more universal insights by conducting an online survey on public acceptance for a set of technologies in the three sub-regions of the Upper Rhine region (URR). Using a representative dataset of 495 German, 501 French, and 493 Swiss inhabitants of the URR, several hypotheses from the acceptance literature are tested across sub-regions and RE technologies and results are compared to related empirical studies from the literature. Moreover, we explore for the first time how public acceptance is linked with community energy and energy autonomy. The latter is especially important to understand how policy and project initiators can mobilise the population to contribute to the energy transition. Our main findings are that public acceptance is, inter alia, highly dependent on the technology in question, the dimension of social acceptance (community versus socio-political dimension) and previous experiences with RE technologies.