Meeting the UK’s clean energy targets and ensuring energy security in an increasingly volatile world requires massive expansion of the UK electricity grid over the next decade, transforming landscapes across the country. While most people support the idea of reducing UK climate impacts and improving energy security, there is often significant local opposition to grid development. Our research investigates why generalised public support for clean energy doesn’t always translate into localised acceptance of the infrastructure needed to deliver it. We consider three crucial questions:
First, we examine how local politicians respond to grid infrastructure proposals. National infrastructure planning rules reduce local councils’ power to influence these decisions at a time when we are seeing a shift away from the mainstream parties’ dominance of political discourse. We consider how these factors influence local representatives’ actions in response to proposed infrastructure. Through surveys and focus groups with councillors, we will understand the competing pressures they face in responding to constituents’ concerns, reflecting party loyalties, and accommodating personal views.
Secondly, we explore how people’s political views and local identities shape their responses to new grid infrastructure. Through large scale survey work and follow-up interviews with people living in the areas that are most likely to see new grid infrastructure, we investigate what conditions make infrastructure acceptable or unacceptable. We look at how people’s sense of personal values and their political identities interact with their feelings about landscape change and their perceptions of the burdens (and possible benefits) that come from new grid infrastructure.
Finally, we investigate how grid developers understand public engagement, what drives their practices, and what constraints and trade-offs they feel they must navigate to deliver grid upgrades at a scale not seen in more than 50 years. We do this through document analysis, interviews and workshops with grid operators.
This research will produce practical recommendations for energy companies, local authorities, and national policymakers on building genuine public support for essential infrastructure. By understanding how political identity, local democracy, and institutional practices shape acceptance, we hope to help ensure grid expansion proceeds fairly, and with real community backing.