Submitted by Jonas Meckling on
What explains variation in local support for wind farms in the US? As wind farms have been developed closer and closer to residential areas since the first wind farm was built in California in early 1980s, wind farms diffused in the US especially in the rural areas of the Great Plains all the way through Texas, which came to benefit from wind energy as an economic development model. With increased demand for wind energy due to the recent regulatory and federal investment push towards renewables and increasing competitiveness of wind energy vis-a-vis fossil fuel generation; local opposition to wind farm development on ideological, economic and environmental grounds has come to be the main source blocking full wind energy capacity use in the US. Issues related to permitting are now at the center of effective clean energy policy. Understanding the variation between local attitudes toward wind power is crucial in answering several other questions at the intersection of politics, society and renewable energy technologies in an era where wind farms do not directly benefit their local communities but operate in a centralized electricity system. The project also aims to develop several policy recommendations for wind energy developers, as well as local and state governments in revising their permitting processes and drawing maximum benefit from wind farms for their local communities.
We are seeking to hire several students. The students would primarily collect various data from several sources. Primarily: 1) on the public hearings that took place during local wind farm permitting processes, sometimes available through the local county’s website, 2) local news from the LexisNexis media database on wind farm development processes. The students then would be expected to write case study analyses on the local/state politics and wind energy nexus. Beyond the case studies of more recent attitudes toward wind energy, one or more students would also be expected to locate archival resources for further data collection to include the time period when public hearings were not the norm in the permitting process or the documents were not yet digitized. One student would ideally be equipped to clean transcript and news data preferably using Python or more basic word processing and editing software.
Some level of prior training in one or several fields of social sciences, economic development, environmental or climate policy is necessary. A keen interest in learning about local political context and environmental politics is preferred. Please highlight your relevant coursework in your application, as well as specific data analysis and methodological skills. It would also be helpful to know how many hours per week you would like to work on the project.