Halfway up the ladder: Developer practices and perspectives on community engagement for utility-scale renewable energy in the United States

Abstract

Community engagement is a key pathway for incorporating social considerations into the development of utility-scale renewable energy facilities. Prior literature recommends meaningful, early community engagement to both improve siting outcomes and empower the public to participate in decision-making, but there is no recent nor comprehensive understanding of industry experiences with engagement. This study provides a critical contribution by revealing the practices and perspectives of project developers. We draw upon a survey of 123 professionals employed at 62 unique companies across the United States. We demonstrate that developers are highly concerned about the impact of community opposition on project deployment, and that they already use a variety of engagement strategies and adjust project designs in response to community feedback. However, the public is generally not made aware of project proposals until after land for the project is secured, and industry expenditures on engagement activities pale in comparison to other project development costs. We draw upon Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation to operationalize the engagement preferences of developers, and find that the majority of developers prefer that members of the public provide input but not recommend or make decisions. We characterize this preference as ‘halfway up the ladder’, compared to the idealized vision of full citizen empowerment envisioned in narratives of just transition. These findings contribute to discussion of the role and potential for community engagement to attend to justice in the energy transition.