Landscape Perception and Renewable Energy Systems

While the presence of renewable energy systems (e.g., solar panels, wind turbines) may improve residents’ quality of life in several ways, there are sometimes challenges regarding the public acceptance of these systems at the local level. Together with the Institute for Spatial and Landscape Development at ETH, we aim to investigate the impact of renewable energy systems on landscape perception and preferences in order to devise general principles for how such systems should be placed. As part of this project, we will collect participants’ physiological and behavioral responses to virtual replicas of real environments with and without renewable energy systems. For more information on this project, go to http://www.plus.ethz.ch/research/forschungsprojekte/ENERGYSCAPE.html