The electricity system value of the local acceptance of onshore wind in Europe

TL;DR

This paper quantifies how local acceptance of onshore wind impacts Europe's electricity system costs and deployment, emphasizing the importance of social acceptance policies for net-zero goals.

Contribution

It introduces a soft-linked modeling framework to assess how local stakeholder tolerance influences wind deployment and system costs across Europe.

Findings

Lower impact tolerance can reduce wind's role by up to 84%.

System costs increase by 2-14% with lower acceptance.

Some countries face cost increases of over 20%.

Abstract

The large-scale deployment of wind power is central to Europe`s energy transition but faces challenges due to its social and environmental impacts on communities. Here we assess how the tolerance of local stakeholders to such impacts translates across spatial scales to shape the cost and design of the continent`s net-zero electricity system using a soft-linked modelling framework. We find that lower impact tolerance can reduce the role of onshore wind in Europe reaching net-zero by up to 84% relative to a future where wind enjoys higher acceptance, with other low carbon sources needing to be scaled up to compensate. This translates into total European electricity system costs increasing by between 2-14% while some countries see costs escalating by 20% or more. Our results show that the local acceptance of onshore wind is a key structural driver of the system and highlight the system value of policies to promote it.