Quantifying the trade-off between cost-efficiency and public acceptance for onshore wind

Cost-efficiency and public acceptance are competing objectives for onshore wind locations. We quantify the link between economic wind resources and beautiful landscapes with over 1.5 million ‘scenicness’ ratings of around 200,000 geotagged photographs from across Great Britain. We find statistically significant evidence that planning applications for onshore wind are more likely to be rejected when proposed in more scenic areas. Compared to the technical potential of onshore wind of 1700 TWh at total costs of £280 billion, removing the 10% most scenic areas implies about 18% lower generation potential and 8-26% higher costs. We consider connection distances to the nearest electricity network transformer for the first time, showing that the connection costs constitute up to half of the total costs. The results provide a quantitative framework for researchers and policymakers to consider the trade-offs between cost-efficiency and public acceptance for onshore wind.