Last week a paper led by Emily Key (Snair), recent MES alumna, came out in Energy Research & Social Science, with her Dutch committee member Dirk Oudes (Wageningen) and I as co-authors. The paper, Integrate and embrace or isolate and hide? Using Q-method to understand how to incorporate large-scale solar in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, is open access. This study doesn’t ask whether we should have large-scale solar (LSS), but how. Emily used Q-methodology, a statement-sorting methodology, with interviews, to identify discourses around LSS in rural Nova Scotia towns that have a range of experience with the technology. The two key discourses that emerged connect to some common debates in the literature around landscape management (see below). This allowed her to suggest important questions that should be discussed with communities being considered for LSS, questions that might be useful for lots of other sustainability transitions as well. Congratulations, Emily!
