Research

  • Community-Centered Solar Development

    Supporting Community-Centered Solar Development: A Guide to Hosting Community Conversations About Large-Scale Solar Development This guidebook helps community leaders, planners, developers, and residents facilitate proactive discussions about large-scale solar (LSS) development. As LSS projects grow rapidly across the U.S., these conversations ensure development aligns with local priorities and values. The guide provides a practical, eight-step… Read more

  • What to expect when you’re expecting engagement: Delivering procedural justice in large-scale solar energy deployment

    Props to Karl Hoesch for an excellent paper and the best title I’ve seen so far… Community engagement in the planning process to build large-scale solar (LSS) projects can win local support and advance procedural justice. However, an understanding of community engagement in current LSS development is lacking. Using responses from a U.S. nationwide survey… Read more

  • Partisan winds: Group-level polarization and issue-framing propel attitudes about local wind farms

    Political polarization is an obstacle to public support and effective communication for renewable energy projects. Depolarizing messages can be helpful, but it is difficult to determine where to concentrate efforts until social scientists first disentangle the effects of unconscious issue-based and conscious group norm-based polarization processes. This study investigates the extent to which attitudes towards… Read more

  • My quick take on solar & heat islands…

    Here’s my quick take on large-scale solar and heat islands, having very quickly reviewed the literature below: Bottom line: temperatures do rise immediately above and adjacent to solar farms, but decrease under the panels. Vegetation mitigates these effects. The temperature increases also dissipate rapidly as you move away from the panels. Solar farms do not… Read more

  • Electricity access empowers women through expansion of economic, physical, and mental spaces in Zambia

    Expanding electricity access (Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7) and empowering women (SDG 5) are closely linked. Most studies quantifying the benefits of the former for women focus on their economic empowerment; however, if and how such access results in women’s empowerment is best understood by examining the cultural context, norms, and gender roles in which… Read more

  • Energy Values Lab at MSU and partners selected for $2.5 million US DOE Solar Energy Technology Office award to study social science of siting!

    The Energy Values Lab in the Department of Community Sustainability, led by Doug Bessette, at Michigan State University has been selected for a $2,500,000 award by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office! This interdisciplinary and multi-institution project aims to answer a single comprehensive research question: how can we speed large-scale solar permitting… Read more