Thirty years of North American research on public acceptance of wind energy has produced important insights, yet knowledge gaps remain. This review synthesizes the literature, revealing the following ...lessons learned. (1) North American support for wind has been consistently high. (2) The NIMBY explanation for resistance to wind development is invalid. (3) Socioeconomic impacts of wind development are strongly tied to acceptance. (4) Sound and visual impacts of wind facilities are strongly tied to annoyance and opposition, and ignoring these concerns can exacerbate conflict. (5) Environmental concerns matter, though less than other factors, and these concerns can both help and hinder wind development. (6) Issues of fairness, participation, and trust during the development process influence acceptance. (7) Distance from turbines affects other explanatory variables, but alone its influence is unclear. (8) Viewing opposition as something to be overcome prevents meaningful understandings and implementation of best practices. (9) Implementation of research findings into practice has been limited. The paper also identifies areas for future research on wind acceptance. With continued research efforts and a commitment toward implementing research findings into developer and policymaker practice, conflict and perceived injustices around proposed and existing wind energy facilities might be significantly lessened.
Wind power technology has changed rapidly in recent years. Technology innovation, evolving power markets, and competing land and ocean uses continue to influence the design and operation of wind ...turbines and plants. Anticipating these trends and their impact on future facilities can inform commercial strategies and research priorities. Drawing from a recent survey of 140 of the world's foremost wind experts, we identify expectations of future wind plant design in 2035, both for onshore and offshore wind. Experts anticipate continued growth in turbine size, to 5.5 (onshore) and 17 MW (offshore), with plants located in increasingly less favorable wind and siting regimes. They expect plant sizes of 1,100 MW for fixed‐bottom and 600 MW for floating offshore wind. Experts forecast enhanced grid‐system value from wind through significant to widespread use of larger rotors, hybrid projects with batteries and hydrogen production, and more. To explain experts' perspectives on future plant design and operation, we identify five mechanisms: economies of unit, plant, and resource scale; grid‐system value economies; and production efficiencies. We characterize learning effects as a moderating influence on the strength of these mechanisms. In combination, experts predict that these design choices support levelized cost of energy reductions of 27% (onshore) and 17%–35% (floating and fixed‐bottom offshore) by 2035 compared to today, while enhancing wind energy's grid service offerings. Our findings provide a much‐needed benchmark for representing future wind technologies in power sector models and address a critical research gap by explaining the economics behind wind energy design choices.
As wind turbines and the number of wind projects scale throughout the world, a growing number of individuals might be affected by these structures. For some people, wind turbine sounds and their ...effects on the landscape can be annoying and could even prompt stress reactions. This comparative study analyzed a combined sample of survey respondents from the U.S., Germany and Switzerland. It utilized a newly developed assessment scale (AS-Scale) to reliably characterize these stress-impacted individuals living within populations near turbines. Findings indicate low prevalence of annoyance, stress symptoms and coping strategies. Noise annoyance stress (NAS-Scale) was negatively correlated with the perceptions of a lack of fairness of the wind project's planning and development process, among other subjective variables. Objective indicators, such as the distance from the nearest turbine and sound pressure level modeled for each respondent, were not found to be correlated to noise annoyance. Similar result patterns were found across the European and U.S. samples.
•Residents stressed by wind turbines represent a small proportion of the population.•Lower prevalence of stress related annoyance compared to single annoyance assessment.•Experienced planning process related to stress by wind turbine noise, distance not.•Average attitude toward the local wind farm is positive.•Similar result patterns found in the U.S. and European samples.
Research suggests that parents often change parenting strategies between children, but few studies have examined parents’ perceptions of those changes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to ...create a measure of parental perception of experience-based change between firstborn and secondborn. Participants included 401 parents (62.9% female, 76.6% White, Mage = 39.91) with at least two adolescent children (older Mage = 14.5; younger Mage = 11.84) split evenly between mixed (49%) and same gender (51%) sibling pairs. The measure items assessed parents’ perception of parenting changes between their children for monitoring, expectations, nurturing, and discipline. Analyses further support the reliability and validity of the measure; for example, parents who reported lower expectations between children reported lower parenting self-efficacy, and parents who perceived becoming less nurturing between children reported a less positive relationship with the secondborn. Discussion focuses on implications and directions for future research using the measure.
Research with rural LGBTQ + youth suggests their experiences of stigma and victimization, as well as related health concerns, may be greater than that of urban LGBTQ + youth. Regional differences may ...also affect their experiences, yet we lack research on the nuanced contextual factors affecting LGBTQ + youth in the rural Midwest. This study examined the lived experiences pertaining to community and school environments among LGBTQ + youth in rural Minnesota (N = 7). Specifically, we aimed to understand how youth navigated their gender and sexual identities, including authenticity, within these contexts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with LGBTQ + youth and then analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings include three themes: (1) school-related hostility and challenges; (2) community intolerance affecting personal authenticity; and (3) affirming environments, support, and authenticity. The findings indicate rural LGBTQ + youth in Minnesota have difficulty accessing inclusive resources and navigating rural environments; also highlighting the resiliency of youth and their ability to identify people and spaces that provided opportunities to practice authenticity and wholeness.
Past work highlights that parents' differential treatment has implications for offspring's mental and relational health across the life course. Although the current body of literature has examined ...offspring- and parent-level correlates of differential treatment, research has yet to consider whether and how patterns of differential treatment are transmitted across generations.
As part of a two-wave longitudinal study of 157 families, both grandparents (M age = 76.50 years, SD = 6.20) and parents (M age = 51.10 years, SD = 4.41) reported on differential treatment of their own offspring at both phases.
A series of residualized change models revealed support for both continuity and compensation hypotheses. Middle-aged parents tended to model the patterns of differential treatment exhibited by their fathers, but middle-aged men who experienced more differential treatment from their own parents in recent years tended to subsequently exhibit lower levels of differential treatment to their offspring.
These findings suggest that patterns of differential treatment both continue and diverge across generations, and those patterns vary by gender. On a broader level, these results also suggest that siblings not only impact one another's development, but in adulthood, they may indirectly influence their nieces' and nephews' development by virtue of their influence on their siblings' parenting.
Over 60,000 utility-scale wind turbines are installed in the United States as of October, 2019, representing over 97 gigawatts of electric power capacity; US wind turbine installations continue to ...grow at a rapid pace. Yet, until April 2018, no publicly-available, regularly updated data source existed to describe those turbines and their locations. Under a cooperative research and development agreement, analysts from three organizations collaborated to develop and release the United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) - a publicly available, continuously updated, spatially rectified data source of locations and attributes of utility-scale wind turbines in the United States. Technical specifications and wind facility data, incorporated from five sources, undergo rigorous quality control. The location of each turbine is visually verified using high-resolution aerial imagery. The quarterly-updated data are available in a variety of formats, including an interactive web application, comma-separated values (CSV), shapefile, and application programming interface (API). The data are used widely by academic researchers, engineers and developers from wind energy companies, government agencies, planners, educators, and the general public.
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