Crowdsourced scenicness and acceptance of wind power

How does the beauty of the landscape, i.e. scenicness, play into the deployment of wind power? And how can we measure scenicness?

Those questions are addressed by Professor Russell McKenna and his co-authors in the study Quantifying the trade-off between cost-efficiency and public acceptance for onshore wind (working paper) and journal paper Scenicness assessment of onshore wind sites with geotagged photographs and impacts on approval and cost-efficiency.

Inspired by the Economist article Computer analysis of what is scenic may help town planners, the researchers applied the scenicness dataset ScenicOrNot to evaluate wind deployment in landscapes.

During the interview, we discuss Pablo Hevia-Koch's PhD thesis on acceptance costs. The Peer Review section discusses the study How much wind power potential does Europe have? Examining European wind power potential with an enhanced socio-technical atlas. And the comment to this from McKenna et al.: On the socio-technical potential for onshore wind in Europe: A response to Enevoldsen et al.  Also, the response by Enevoldsen et al. 

The study was authored by Russell McKenna of University of Aberdeen, previously Technical University of Denmark. Jann Weinand of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Ismir Mulalić of Copenhagen Business School, Stefan Petrović of Danish Energy Agency, previously Technical University of Denmark, Kai Mainzer of greenventory, and Tobias Preis and Helen Susannah Moat, both of Warwick Business School and The Alan Turing Institute.