Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Addressing climate change requires societies to transition the electricity grid towards low-carbon sources, including renewable energy. For this reason, building wind and solar energy provides public goods, reducing both local air pollution and global climate change. In the United States, the electricity system is undergoing a rapid shift away from conventional technologies, most notably coal fired power plants, towards renewable energy resources. By far the biggest growth area is in wind energy, supplying 5% of total electricity consumed in the US in 2015. Yet, this technology has proven politically controversial, with social movements arising to protest wind energy sites in the United States and around the world. We aim to build on existing research to understand what factors predict local resistance to wind energy across the US using a large data set and quantitative methods. In this paper, we use an original data set of all onshore wind energy projects across the United States to identify factors associated with social movements against wind energy. Using coded newspaper data, we develop indicators of protests at every operational wind project (N=~900), including protest scale and intensity. We merge this data with census and project information, including whether the project has community ownership or benefits sharing. Preliminary findings demonstrate that many wind projects are accepted without social movements arising to protest the projects. Full results will examine how numerous covariates, including population density, community ownership, partisanship and census variables, predict wind protests.