The sudden and exponential increase of projects for the production of energy from renewable sources has drastically increased in the last decade, by also triggering a widespread citizens' disapproval towards such initiatives worldwide. Consequently, research on public acceptance of renewable energy initiatives has become an important and well-established topic in energy research, too. Social research mostly investigated the phenomenon via case-based approach. Our research departs it and adopts a bibliometric perspective on existing contributions to draw general insights on public acceptance for diverse renewable energy technologies. Results show a significant difference in the motivations of public opposition towards the implementation and realisation of technological infrastructures and processes for the exploitation of different renewable energy.
Despite renewable energy production systems are often framed as socially, and environmentally more sustainable, just and, therefore, desirable than their fossil-fuelled or carbon-intensive counterparts [1, 2], energy transition plans and renewable energy infrastructures emerged in the last decade as objects of contestation themselves [3,4,5,6]. Opposition to the installation of energy infrastructures is not new [7]. For instance, Luque-Ayala and Silver [8] noted that, in general, an energy infrastructure for public opinion "becomes a material technique for incorporating populations into economic markets and circuits of capital [….]. [It] is a contested space, disrupted by different stakeholders to advance their rights and social values" (p.6). Whether and how renewable-energy plans are backed up on diverse socio-political values and materialise, on their turn, in distinctive infrastructures is a currently disputed research topic. Several authors noted a discrepancy between ideal adhesion to renewable energy transition plans and the practical measures that could make them possible [9]. Despite a general acknowledgement of the opportunity to shift toward renewable sources, the practicalities connected with the design and installation of necessary infrastructures for renewable energy production and distribution (further than the transformation of collective and personal routines in energy consumption) proved to be controversial [10,11]. At the implementation stage, social acceptance often represents a significant barrier when discontents spring out into outspoken forms of opposition so that infrastructure realisation is setback by the resistance of local groups to specific projects.
