Quantifying social factors for onshore wind planning – A systematic review

The integration of social factors into quantitative planning models is essential for accelerating the deployment of onshore wind turbines by identifying feasible potential early in the planning stage. This systematic literature review analyzes the existing quantification of social factors associated with onshore wind power and methods for integrating these factors into planning models. Disamenities due to visual and landscape impacts, proximity to settlements, and justice considerations are the most quantified so far and frequently cited as being the most important factors affecting the social acceptance of onshore wind turbines. Furthermore, the quantification of these could be improved through visual impact assessment techniques, standardized choice experiments, and the assessment of justice beyond the spatial distribution tenet. Future research should also focus on understanding the dynamics of social acceptance and the resulting uncertainty of quantified social factors. Amongst the different planning models, multi-objective optimization has become increasingly popular, as it can integrate social factors endogenously and exogenously, is suitable for different planning scales, and is able to examine the trade-offs between cost-effectiveness, local disamenities, and distributional justice. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of using different methods for quantifying social factors on the resulting socially- and techno-economically-optimal system costs and spatial turbine allocations. Challenges also remain in overcoming the complexity for integrating network connection costs and their externalities into planning models. This review serves as an overview for energy system modelers, planners, and quantitative social scientists to better integrate social factors into onshore wind planning models.