The next phase in social acceptance of renewable innovation

Policies on the utilization of renewables, such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and marine sources have been drafted in most countries. Although such policies have existed for more than three decades now, the acceptance of renewables by society has hardly been recognized as
an important issue. Currently, the slow development of renewable energy sourcing in most countries is often blamed on this oversight, and within policy and among developers there still is
little understanding of social acceptance issues. Moreover, the next crucial phase in the deployment of renewable energy systems for electricity (RES-E) concerns the integration of several different
RES-E sources in the power supply system and with electricity demand. This requires the introduction of ‘intelligent grids’ (frame) that facilitate ‘distributed generation’ (DG), i.e. geographically
dispersed power generation using renewable sources. However, such intelligent grids imply a fully different way of organizing the power supply, and all elements of the reorganization may suffer
from lack of acceptance in society, just as the ‘simple’ deployment of renewables within the existing power supply has shown to be problematic.