Elizabeth Côté's scientific contributions

This report seeks to provide a reflection on the research completed within the network by combining the accumulated knowledge of the MISTRAL network on key social acceptance variables and key papers addressing them, providing a ‘travel guide’ to social acceptance research for those embarking on research on social dimensions of renewable energy and the energy transition. In the last section of this report, you can also find research conducted by the MISTRAL-ITN Early Stage Researchers. This acts as a guide for a range of key concepts commonly used in research on the special acceptance of renewable energy.

Achieving climate-neutrality requires considerable investment in energy storage systems (ESS) to integrate variable renewable energy sources into the grid. However, investments into ESS are often unprofitable, in particular for grid-scale battery storage and green hydrogen technologies, prompting many actors to call for policy intervention. This study investigates investor-specific risk-return preferences for ESS investment and derives policy recommendations. Insights are drawn from 1,605 experimental investment-related decisions obtained from 42 high-level institutional investors and utility representatives. Results reveal that both investor groups view revenue stacking as key to making ESS investment viable. While the expected return on investment is the most important project characteristic, risk-return preferences for other features diverge between groups. Institutional investors appear more open to exploring new technological ventures (20% of utility respondents would not consider making investments into solar photovoltaic-hydrogen), whereas utilities seem to prefer greenfield projects (23% of surveyed institutional investors rejected such projects). Interestingly, both groups show strong aversion towards energy market price risk. Institutional investors require a premium of 6.87 percentage points and utilities 5.54 percentage points for moving from a position of fully hedged against market price risk to a scenario where only 20% of revenue is fixed, underlining the need for policy support.

Renewable energy (RE) auctions were partly introduced to lower the cost of policy support. However, policy-makers are increasingly aware that effective policies require a broader set of objectives that include securing actor diversity and social acceptance. While several countries have introduced measures to incentivize citizen participation in RE projects to meet those objectives, little is known about their effect on the risk perceptions of developers in auction settings. Based on insights from 559 experimental choices made by 61 European project developers, this study investigates risk-return preferences for different onshore wind energy auction designs. We show that developers are willing to accept the requirement to submit bid bonds up to a certain threshold, and that a 36-month realisation period is preferred overall. While developers may be open to citizen co-investment, the risk premiums they require increase with the share of capital offered to local residents in auction settings, highlighting an apparent trade-off between promoting actor diversity and low-cost RE deployment. Policymakers unwilling to compensate developers for the price of increasing actor diversity may have to find other ways to promote citizen participation in order to achieve RE objectives, as this factor may have important implications for the acceptance of RE deployment.