My dissertation, “Landscape Disruption and Perceived Urban Bias in Climate Policy: Drivers of Rural Opposition to Solar Energy in South Korea,” comprises three essays that focus on opposition to solar energy projects in South Korea.
“Landscape disruption has been driving local opposition to renewable energy projects around the world. The same is for South Korea, but mostly in rural areas, which has not only derailed “proposed” projects but “future” ones, by invoking anti-reneawble energy regulations across rural counties…”
Rural opposition to landscape change from solar energy: Explaining the diffusion of setback restrictions on solar farms across South Korean counties
- Accepted by Energy Research & Social Science
- Replication materials here
While the number of utility-scale solar farms has increased in the past decade in South Korea, more than half of county governments have adopted local setback ordinances against solar farms. This study provides evidence that rural opposition to landscape change from solar farms was a key driver for county governments to adopt the ordinance. The event history analysis across 225 counties from 2012 to 2020 shows that rural counties with high chances of landscape change from solar farms, measured with solar farm density, faced a higher risk to adopt the ordinance. Interview research suggests that rural opposition to landscape change has motivated government officials to adopt the ordinance. This implies that a national climate policy with renewable energy expansion as its mitigation tool may confront local policy barriers if it does not mitigate local negative impacts from renewable facilities and their associated costs.
“…But landscape disruption can be an sailent issue for both ruralites and urbanites. Moreover, concerns over landscape disruption from renewable energy projects may have a negative spillover effect on renewable energy policy at a national level…”
Who supports subsidizing renewable energy via an electricity surcharge? Evidence from an online survey in South Korea
- Replication materials here
South Korean households pay a renewable energy surcharge on their electricity bills to finance the governmental subsidies for renewables. To accelerate decarbonization, the government needs to provide higher subsidies, and this might require increasing the surcharge. Drawing on evidence from an original online survey in South Korea (n=1,043), I find that the support for the surcharge is shaped by respondents’ perceptions of local costs and benefits from solar farms in their vicinity. Respondents who believe solar farms disrupt the landscapes are less likely to support the surcharge increase while those who believe solar farms reduce local air pollution are more likely to support it. The implication is that government politics that mitigate the negative impacts of renewable energy on local communities can enhance the political feasibility of renewable energy surcharge.
“Now let’s go back to rural areas. Is the landscape disruption the end of the story? No. There are more nuanced sources of rural opposition to renewable energy projects, which is rural residents’ perception on an uneven distribution of the benefits and costs of renewable energy. I call it “perceived urban bias in solar energy,” which undermines political feasibility of local solar energy projects, and further undermines rural support for solar energy in general…”
Do perceptions of urban bias in solar energy drive rural opposition to solar farms? A survey experiment in South Korea
Across the world, renewable energy projects are facing pushback from local residents. Much of the literature focuses on NIMBY-type motivations to explain this pushback: rural residents do not want to incur private costs such as landscape destruction or diminished property values to support a public good, climate mitigation. Yet, there is another source of rural opposition: the perception that renewable energy projects reveal an urban bias in solar energy.
This study employs a field survey experiment with randomized vignette treatments to explore how perceived urban bias in solar energy reduces support among rural residents for solar energy expansion. Urban bias refers to the notion that solar farms benefit urban areas (where much of the electricity is consumed) more than rural areas, while the costs are borne predominantly by rural residents. I test two treatment frames that trigger the notion of urban bias in solar energy. The first frame highlights that while solar farms are largely located in rural areas, they are biased toward urban populations in general by producing and transmitting electricity to urban from rural areas. The second frame also highlights that solar farms are largely located in rural areas but are biased toward urban developers that reap profits from such solar farms.
The difference between the first and second frames is that they attribute urban bias to a different group of urban populations, the general urban population versus a small group of urban elites. In terms of my empirical strategy, I administered this survey in two rural villages with varying levels of conflict between solar energy developers and rural residents.
The preliminary finding shows that respondents exposed to either the first or second treatment frame are less likely to support solar energy expansion than those exposed to the control frame. Yet, there is a notable variation in the treatment effects depending on where the survey was conducted. In a town where the level of conflict between solar energy developers and rural residents was higher, both treatment effects are negative and statistically significant. However, these effects lose statistical significance in another town where the level of conflict is lower. This implies that the notion of urban bias is not a salient factor that drives solar energy opposition in all rural areas: respondents respond to such notions negatively only if they have previous experiences of contestation with solar energy developers in their neighborhood.
This paper makes three contributions. Theoretically, it joins a body of literature that examines how rural residents’ beliefs about rural-urban inequality shapes their political attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on the fact that most renewable energy facilities are located in rural areas, this study examines if such beliefs also drive opposition to renewable energy facilities in rural areas. Empirically, this paper tests an explanation for rural opposition to renewable facilities in South Korea. Doing so will shed light on whether profit-sharing mechanisms in the renewable energy planning processes might reduce rural opposition to solar farms.