Using a Critical Approach to Unpack the Visual-Spatial Impacts of Energy Infrastructures

This chapter problematises the visual impact of large-scale energy infrastructures as a significant factor associated with people’s responses to these infrastructures. We first critically review social acceptance literature on the visual impacts of renewable energy technologies (RET) to propose the disentanglement of its three interrelated dimensions: individual/positional, community/local and socio-cultural/institutional. We then suggest that some analytical tools from the theory of social representations might be useful for empirically grasping how those three dimensions shape people’s responses to RET. To illustrate this proposal, we examine data collected from UK newspapers from 2008 to 2014 on wind energy. We finish by discussing how the visual-spatial impacts of RET reflect and shape the commodification of RET as part of the larger socio-economic and political system that they are materialising.