Submission on EirGrid's consultation on `Shaping Our Electricity Future'. ESRI Submission May 2021.

Developers of renewable energy infrastructure, as well as transmission grid infrastructure, often face public opposition to new projects. Scenario analysis of generation and transmission system investment show that many future pathways are feasible but alternatives are not without impacts on system costs and electricity prices [1–5]. As the power system expands with greater generation and transmission capacity required over the coming decade, system costs and electricity prices could dramatically escalate if there is a sharp deterioration in the public’s acceptance of new energy infrastructure [4]. The implication for the electricity sector and society in general is that community and stakeholder engagement on new energy infrastructure projects should continue to be a key priority. Public acceptance of energy infrastructure is often characterised as a local issue where the new infrastructure is to be located. Both developer and public policy initiatives exist to encourage acceptance of new infrastructure in local communities, often conceptualised in terms of willingness to accept costs. But the impact on the power system’s costs and(implicit) electricity prices are neither necessarily local to the area of potential new infrastructure nor uniform across the network. For example, impacts can occur on opposite sides of the country in terms of unserved power or higher system costs, es-pecially in the Dublin region where network congestion is most acute [4]. The estimates by Koecklin et al.[4] of implicit (or shadow) regional electricity prices conditional on varying levels of public acceptance of electricity infrastructure are a metric of both system-wide and regional network values of development of new infrastructure necessary to maintain electricity supply security and achieve renewable electricity targets

Renewable electricity generation and transmission network developments in light of public opposition: Insights from Ireland. ESRI Working Paper No. 653 March 2020

This paper analyses how people’s attitudes towards onshore wind power and overhead transmission lines affect the costoptimal development of electricity generation mixes, under a high renewable energy policy. For that purpose, we use a power systems generation and transmission expansion planning model, combined with information on public attitudes towards energy infrastructure on the island of Ireland. Overall, households have a positive attitude towards onshore wind power but their willingness to accept wind farms near their homes tends to be low. Opposition to overhead transmission lines is even greater. This can lead to a substantial increase in the costs of expanding the power system. In the Irish case, costs escalate by more than 4.3% when public opposition is factored into the constrained optimisation of power generation and grid expansion planning across the island. This is mainly driven by the compounded effects of higher capacity investments in more expensive technologies such as offshore wind and solar photovoltaic to compensate for lower levels of onshore wind generation and grid reinforcements. The results also reveal the effect of public opposition on the value of onshore wind, via shadow prices. The higher the level of public opposition, the higher the shadow value of onshore wind. And, this starkly differs across regions: regions with more wind resource or closest to major demand centres have the highest shadow prices. The shadow costs can guide policy makers when designing incentive mechanisms to garner public support for onshore wind installations