PVMapper: Report on the Second Public Opinion Survey

Juliet Carlisle ; Jeffrey Joe ; Stephanie Kane ; Dave Koehler ; David Solan

关键词: NIMBY;    Public Opinion;    Utility Scale Solar;   

DOI  :  10.2172/1122121
RP-ID  :  INL/EXT-13-30706
PID  :  OSTI ID: 1122121

学科分类：再生能源与代替技术

美国|英语

来源: SciTech Connect

【 摘 要 】

This report has been developed as an integral part of the PVMapper project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy???s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy???s SunShot program. The objective of the SunShot program is to reduce the total costs of solar energy systems. The scope of PVMapper is to develop a geographic information system (GIS) based project planning tool to identify optimal utility-scale solar facility sites. The specific objectives of the project are to 1) develop the software on an open-source platform; 2) integrate the appropriate data sets and GIS layers; 3) include a measure of social risk and public acceptance; 4) enable customization of variable weights; 5) provide a free and accessible platform for software download; and 6) provide a sustainability plan to ensure future relevance of the software. When completed, PVMapper is intended to be used by solar developers, Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs), and other interested parties. This project supports SunShot???s objective by reducing the non-hardware balance of system costs (???soft costs???) for utility-scale solar project development. In order to accomplish the third project objective ??? including a measure of social risk and public acceptance within PVMapper ??? the project team has developed a time-series public opinion survey, administered yearly over the course of the three-year project. This report highlights the results and preliminary analyses from the second survey in this series. While the results of this survey are valuable to both PVMapper and future utility-scale solar development, the time-series design is extremely important. The completion of the series enables the extension of the dataset to much richer information. For example, the research team altered this iteration to sharpen the focus on specific topics (those posing potentially higher risks) and target specific locations in the oversample (such as communities near existing facilities). Using similar approaches for each iteration leads to an increasingly greater amount of detail regarding siting risks. The need for this extended dataset to aid in siting utility-scale solar projects is evident, as developers continue to scale back initial plans due to unidentified or incorrectly quantified social risks. It should be noted that this report provides the complete dataset from the survey, encompassing the wide-ranging responses from all of the survey questions. Although the methods used to integrate these data into PVMapper???s siting algorithms is not the purpose of this report, allusions to integration can be found in the discussions surrounding the design of questions and types of data to be used.