ABSTRACT
The impacts of renewables are generally much less than those of conventional energy technologies, but there is still a need to negotiate public acceptance. This chapter reviews the wind farm case study and looks at how the debate has continued, with the focus moving on to attempts to ensure that local communities can have more direct involvement with, and benefits from, such projects. Local involvement is vital in that, rather than seeing local concerns as a problem, well-informed criticism might also be seen more positively as an attempt to subject technology to some form of direct social control. After all, one of the alleged benefits of at least some types of renewable energy technology was that they were likely to be more amenable to local democratic control than the preceding large-scale, centralised technologies.
