The course is connected to the following study programs

  • Offshore Wind Energy

Teaching language

English

Course contents

The overall focus of this module is to contribute to greater insight and reflexivity around opportunities and challenges linked to offshore wind development from a socio-technical perspective. Through the presentation of political and legal frameworks as well as central themes and selected social science methods and theories, the student will be able to investigate wider socio-technical implications of an offshore wind project. This will increase insight into the variety of social, economic, environmental controversies and contribute with, among other things, dialogue-based tools to solve them.

The offshore wind revolution from a sociotechnical perspective: This part focuses on the overall role and significance of offshore wind in Europe and Norway within the last decades. Focus is on the climate, energy, safety, and economic dimensions of the massive investment with a view to understanding the underlying international, national and regional rationales. In addition, the interaction between offshore wind, political agendas, and the overall concept of energy as socio-technical systems is highlighted. This implies presenting various basic theoretical approaches to the concepts of social acceptance and energy justice including challenging conceptual issues and listing principal stakeholder interests in a typical offshore wind project.

Host community concerns in offshore wind projects: This part focuses on host community attitudes to offshore wind projects. The lecture has two focal points. Partly, the focus is directed towards some of the key factors that have shown to influence community responses to offshore wind - such as landscape, environment, place attachment, trust, property values, health, economy and recognitional, distributional and procedural energy justice. Partly, the focus is on public participation, controversies, and the role of government policy in regulating and mediating the drivers of social acceptance in the planning process. Central steps in this planning process to obtain the planning permit for offshore wind farms that includes community concerns are described, including the role of environmental impact assessment (EIA).

Governance of offshore wind energy projects: This part focuses on how national, regional and municipal planning and governance actors handle the OW development. The perspective is twofold: on ‘hard spaces’ of government, legislative planning procedures; and on ‘soft spaces’ of community participation, multi-actor-network governance, and socio-environmental values. Existing regimes of governance will be identified, including national policies, formal government actors and legislative regulations which premise planning procedures and spaces of governance and public participation in OW planning, but also various perspectives on dilemmas, potentials and needs for new governance models. Additionally various perspectives on governance and not least public participation and how to facilitate a fair and inclusive participatory process is being discussed.

Pathways to co-existence of offshore wind and regional development:  this part focuses on various perspectives on co-existence of offshore wind and regional development. Energy development has over time been the subject of various regional development models. This lecture unfolds such models with a historical look back to hydropower and oil development in Norway and forward to the development of the modern regional offshore wind power adventure. With reference to the previous lectures in sub-module 3.1, limitations and potentials of such models will be discussed. Furthermore, alternative perspectives and concrete experiences from other countries will be presented and discussed.

Groupwork presentations: This session is interactive in that participants will present their group work to each other in plenary and receive feed-back from lecturers and peer groups. Each group gives a 15 min. PowerPoint presentation which, together with the report on which it is based, is part of the final examination.

Learning outcomes

After the successful completion of the course, the students should:

  • understand the interaction between offshore wind development and basic socio-technical dimensions of renewable energy systems including key concepts like
  • be able to describe typical stakeholders in offshore wind projects and outline their interests.
  • acquire knowledge about key community attitudes and controversies to offshore wind projects and be able to explain the main steps and pros and cons in carrying out an environmental impact analysis (EIA)
  • get insight into various governance approaches to the planning and handling of offshore wind projects and be able to describe and reflect on the major steps in a public participation process.
  • acquire knowledge of analytical frameworks for different pathways and models to co-existence of offshore wind and regional development.
  • be able to apply relevant concepts and theories to analyze and reflect on challenges and opportunities related to economic, ecological, social, legal, political and regional dimensions of offshore wind development.
  • be able to make suggestions for a planning process the comply with energy justice perspectives.
  • be able to communicate knowledge in writing through argumentative texts.

Teaching methods

Online lectures, facilitated group discussions, case studies, project work and student presentations. Estimated workload for the average student is approximately 70 hours.

Evaluation

A digital evaluation will be organized in accordance with the quality system for education, chapter 4.1.

Offered as Single Standing Module

Yes, if there are places available.

Admission Requirement if given as Single Standing Module

Admission requirements for the course are the same as for the Study programme on Offshore Wind

Assessment methods and criteria

A report on a chosen case is to be written and presented orally in plenum leading to fail/pass. Maximum of 4 pages (individual) and 6 pages (if based on group work). Assessment of the assignment will be determined 75% by the report and 25% by the presentation.

Last updated from FS (Common Student System) July 18, 2024 4:27:15 AM