The WENDY project has developed a Social Acceptance Interventions (SAI) Tool, which is an interactive and user-friendly tool to increase support towards wind energy.
The tool is web-based and consolidates recommendations, best practices, and interventions implemented to enhance social acceptance or reduce opposition to wind farms across the globe.
The purpose of the tool is to inform citizens, community members, and other interested parties about social acceptance. Additionally, it is a decision-support tool for policy makers and wind energy project owners and developers. The recommendations are not designed to serve as mandatory checklists for wind energy projects, but rather as beneficial measures that can help enhance acceptance. No wind energy project is the same, and no community or area is identical. Therefore, interventions should be tailored to the specific needs of each site or project.
Considering the complexity of the concept Social Acceptance, the recommendations have been categorised into six groups, based on the challenges they address:
- Socio-economic: addressing challenges related to local economy, infrastructure, community benefits, and investments.
- Landscape related: addressing challenges related to visual, acoustic impact, health concerns.
- Environmental: addressing challenges related to local flora and fauna.
- Institutional: addressing challenges related to communication, planning, and decision-making processes and the national and local level.
- Individual: addressing challenges related to attitude behaviour, psychological traits.
- Technical: addressing challenges related to location, characteristics of project developer, and project characteristics, such as ownership, number of turbines, size, offshore/onshore, turbine technology (e.g. vertical vs horizontal turbine, etc).
