Author: Martine Farstad

As the WENDY project comes to a close, we look back on three years of research, engagement, and collaboration aimed at tackling one of the biggest challenges for renewable energy: social acceptance of wind farms.

Why WENDY?

Wind energy plays a central role in Europe’s clean energy transition. Yet, despite strong overall support for renewables, local opposition to wind farms can delay or even block new projects. WENDY set out to understand the root causes of these challenges and to provide practical solutions that balance technical, environmental, economic, and social factors.

What we did

Throughout the project, WENDY combined research, case studies, and community engagement in four pilot countries—Greece, Italy, Norway, and Spain. Some of the published results so far include:

• Mapping lighthouse wind farms across Europe to identify best practices in community engagement and benefit-sharing (D2.1).
• Analysing framework conditions at EU, national, and regional levels that shape acceptance (D2.2).
• Conducting surveys and interviews with more than 3,500 participants, revealing drivers and barriers of public perception (D2.3).
• Identifying challenges and needs for improved acceptance and participation, highlighting solutions such as ownership models and transparent permitting (D2.4).
• Developing integrated environmental tools, including a life-cycle assessment model that incorporates biodiversity and ecosystem services (D3.1) and a handbook of design solutions to reduce impacts on birds and bats (D3.2).
• Designing KPIs and a single multi-variable indicator to evaluate wind projects holistically, beyond cost and production (D3.4, D4.3).
• Launching a Societal Engagement and Capacity Building Programme with local champions and workshops to test new approaches in practice (D5.1, D5.2).
• Creating the Knowledge Exchange Platform (KEP), an open hub where all reports, tools, and resources are available to stakeholders (D6.2).
• Building strong synergies with sister projects JustWind4All and WIMBY, amplifying outreach and co-developing knowledge (D7.3).

What we learned

Across all studies and interventions, WENDY found that:

• Trust and transparency are critical to public support.
• Economic participation and benefit-sharing significantly increase acceptance.
• Tailored, local approaches work better than one-size-fits-all solutions.
• Environmental integration tools can help balance biodiversity protection with renewable expansion.
• Social acceptance interventions—from early engagement to co-creation—need to be embedded systematically in wind project planning.

What’s next?

The findings of WENDY will live on through the WENDY Knowledge Exchange Platform, ensuring that policymakers, developers, researchers, and communities can access the tools and insights developed. These results provide a strong foundation for future projects and will support Europe in building wind energy that is not only clean and efficient, but also fair, trusted, and accepted by the communities it serves.

🔗 Explore all results here

The Steering Committee of the WENDY project recently convened for a project meeting in Trondheim, hosted by project partner The Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). As the WENDY project approaches its final stages, key insights, recommendations, and lessons learned are beginning to emerge—marking a critical period for reflection and knowledge consolidation.

Since its inception, WENDY has worked across environmental, technical, economic, and social dimensions to advance sustainable wind energy development in Europe. The recent gathering in Trondheim reaffirmed the consortium’s collaborative spirit and its commitment to holistic impact assessment.

On the second day of the meeting, participants had the opportunity to visit the headquarters of SINTEF—one of Europe’s largest independent research organisations. With core strengths in sustainable energy, digitalisation, ocean space, health, and industrial technology, SINTEF exemplifies innovation through close cooperation with public and private sector stakeholders. Touring SINTEF Ocean’s cutting-edge research facilities proved both inspiring and insightful for the consortium, offering fresh perspectives as WENDY prepares to share its final outcomes.

“This final phase is not just about wrapping up – it’s about building momentum. Our time in Trondheim has been a reminder of what’s possible when diverse expertise comes together with a shared purpose. The knowledge we’ve gained here will help shape practical, socially accepted pathways for wind energy across Europe,” said Jonatan Peris, Project Coordinator of WENDY at Fundación CIRCE.

The WENDY project will continue working in its final months to synthesise results and share findings through its Knowledge Exchange Platform, the WENDY website, social media, events, and other platforms.

Find the full press release here.

Wind energy plays an important role in Europe’s transition to renewable energy, but its success depends on the support and acceptance of local communities. The WENDY project works to facilitate wind farm planning to ensure the consideration of landscapes and their values for local communities. Your local knowledge can make a difference!

If you are familiar with, at least parts of, the landscapes within one of the WENDY use cases, Zaragoza (Spain), Calabria (Italy, or Crete (Greece), you can support the development of wind energy planning tools by mapping areas of high importance for you and the local community. Your participation will help ensure that wind farm planning takes into account the local landscapes and resources that are vital to the community, benefiting everyone in the long term. In an online tool, on interactive maps, you can map explicit areas important for e.g. recreational activities, agriculture production, fresh water resources, or areas for exploring the beauty of nature. Your maps will then be included in a holistic planning process, developed and showcased in the WENDY project.

Please note that the online exercise takes only 25 minues and requires proficiency in the local language of the area you wish to contribute mapping (Spanish, Italian, or Greek). To get started, send an email in English to reto.spielhofer@nina.no with the use case area you’d like to map, and you will receive access to the mapping tool.

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:

1. Socio-economic: addressing challenges related to local economy, infrastructure, community benefits, and investments.
2. Landscape related: addressing challenges related to visual, acoustic impact, health concerns.
3. Environmental: addressing challenges related to local flora and fauna.
4. Institutional: addressing challenges related to communication, planning, and decision-making processes and the national and local level.
5. Individual: addressing challenges related to attitude behaviour, psychological traits.
6. 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).

Visit the SAI tool.

Read the full press release here.