Very glad, after a long gestation, to be able to share a new paper out in Energy Research & Social Science today, Does noticing energy infrastructure influence public support for energy development? Evidence from a national survey in Canada. This paper uses a large national sample of Canadians (n=3000) surveyed back in 2014 to explore the impacts of exposure to energy infrastructure on support for that and other technologies. It suggests that reporting noticing ANY energy infrastructure, even just transmission lines, is reliably associated with support for renewables. Does this mean we should stop trying to hide energy infrastructure? Maybe that is too rash: we don’t know the direction of causality in that relationship. But it seems not a giant conceptual leap to suggest that if we are regularly confronted with the means of our energy production we might be moved to conserve energy or limit the impacts of its supply via technology shifts.
Tag: exposure
Energy Transitions collaborator and friend Dr. John Parkins has been in the news this week, talking about recent results published in Energy Policy about residential solar technology adoption in Canada. In the U of A news feed, Folio, John is quoted: “If you are immersed in an environment where these technologies are all around you, they become more familiar and doable”. This shows how important landscape norms are to our shared and individual sense of what is possible and desirable. He goes on to advocate more numerous and prominent installations of solar infrastructure in public buildings, to expedite the creation of norms that facilitate a transition to renewable energies like solar. View the great Global News interview with John here.
Copyright
This website by Kate Sherren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.