Elsevier

Renewable Energy

Volume 35, Issue 10, October 2010, Pages 2348-2355
Renewable Energy

Using collaborative virtual environments to plan wind energy installations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2010.04.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Countries around the world are introducing requirements to significantly increase their proportion of energy from renewable sources, such as wind. Poor siting or poor decision process will produce considerable local opposition delaying implementation and costing both proponents and the concerned public significant time, effort and stress. We propose that collaborative virtual environments have the advantage of allowing multiple involved parties to play out multiple planning scenarios and gather instant feedback in the process – ultimately with the goal of both effective energy generation and maintenance of local amenity. We have built a case study at the real wind turbine site of the Challicum Hills in Victoria, Australia. We use SIEVE (Spatial Information Exploration and Visualisation Environment) as a collaborative environment. SIEVE allows us to automatically build a virtual landscape model from the GIS data and then explore the model in 3D. Users get instant feedback about visible and audible impact (the simulation included attenuated wind turbine sounds). Edits can be performed in 3D and are saved into the GIS database. Finally, SIEVE allows collaborative planning where each participant can make and see changes and gather instant feedback on how these changes affect others (and if they meet resistance). Collaborative environments have the advantage that proposed changes are dynamic (compared to still images) and changes and feedback are directly linked (compared to an iterative planning process where planners develop plans without instant feedback).

Introduction

Europe currently generates 3% of its energy from the wind. The target for 2020 is 20% from renewable sources with wind expected to be up to 80% of this. The same target has been set in Australia. The Obama administration’s ‘New Energy America Plan’ calls for 25% renewables by 2025. To date approximately 1% of current Australian energy production is wind power, and while there is widespread public support for increasing this proportion, there is considerable controversy over many wind energy projects. A significant increase will surely engender considerably more local opposite delaying the implementation process and costing both proponents and the concerned public significant time, effort and stress.

These difficulties are not confined to Australia, and the move to decentralised renewable energy infrastructure has created similar debate across the world. This has motivated the development of better tools for public engagement early in the planning process [1], [2], [3], and more systematic analysis tools which respect multiple criteria in either site selection [4], [5] or impact assessment [6]. Wolsink [7] argued that the proposition that wind farm opposition is a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon is not true and that institutional factors within both government and opposition groups played a more significant role than simple green versus green [8] local opposition based on negative externalities. There is widespread agreement that we need to better understand people’s perceptions of these externalities and also new approaches to breaking of the institutional barriers for effective implementation of new infrastructure (including renewable energy facilities) to deal with recognised pressures on our environment.

The cited externalities associated with wind energy are: effect on the visual landscape, noise (including sub-audible frequencies), disturbance and slaughter of wildlife (especially birds) and shadowing and flicker. The latter is an issue at certain sun angles for certain local residents but is not widespread. The consequences for birds have not been well researched but depend on proximity to habitat and to migration routes. This paper therefore focuses on responses to the visual and aural landscape while recognizing that these may be affected by people’s beliefs about habitat effects.

The importance of visual impact, on landscape aesthetics, in people’s attitude to wind energy developments has been confirmed in a number of studies. Wolsink [9] stated: “The strongest impact on the attitudes (towards wind power) concerned the aesthetic value of wind turbines”. Ladenburg and Dubgaard [10] summarise a number of willingness-to-pay (WTP) studies which compared visual impacts with both other types of impact and with levels of compensation required to engender acceptance of new wind energy developments. These studies, based on contingent valuation methods, reported WTP figures of the order of 10–30 Euros per year per household. In their own study Ladenburg and Dubgaard found that people were willing to reduce the visual impact of off-shore wind energy facilities by paying a premium for them to be located further offshore. For example, to move development from 8 km to 18 km off-shore the WTP among the general public was 94 Euro/household/year. For those ‘who can see off-shore wind farms from their residence or summer-house’ the corresponding sum was 422 Euro/household/year. These figures indicate substantial public interest in reducing the visual impact.

Wind turbines have become quieter due to improved blade design. Nevertheless the distance at which they should be removed from housing is contentious. The Danish wind energy peak body argues that 7 blade diameters (about 300 m) is sufficient separation, the Canadian energy ministry specifies a setback of 450 m, the action group Wind Resistance argues for at least 2.5 km separation to avoid ill effects on residents [11]. In none of the aesthetic studies referred to above was sound even included as a factor, in most cases the distances involved were beyond even the more pessimistic views of required separation distances. In researching public responses it may not be necessary to consider sound as a negative factor in isolation, but it may be relevant to include sounds in the assessment process to determine the extent to which acceptability levels may be influenced by the sound of the turbines – in the broad context of environmental sounds recognising that other environmental sounds (bird song, traffic noise etc) may also affect the overall perception [12].

The studies cited above were based mostly on static images. Visual imagery, initially slides and printed photographs, have been validated in relation to the quality of views (scenic beauty) in a number of studies [13], [14]. However, it has been argued that the use of static imagery has several limitations, specifically when presenting motion related elements such as water flow [15] or when testing responses in situations when the viewer is in motion. Heft and Nasar [16], for example, found differences in preference when comparing static photographs with video sequences of travel along a route. Bishop and Miller [17], in an Internet based study, used animated imagery and found a significantly lower impact for wind turbines with moving blades than for those with stationary blades. Daniel & Meitner [18] argued that static imagery is best used in situations where there is little natural movement – either of the landscape elements or the observers. In a detailed review of the application of, primarily, static imagery in the context of parks and outdoor recreation, Manning and Freimund [19] concluded:

Given the pace of technological advancement, the possibilities for edited digital video, virtual reality and other ways of presenting reality may emerge as viable research tools sooner than might be expected. When they do, this review suggests that these visual media will further facilitate effective communication between researchers and respondents and our understanding of the acceptability of social and ecological conditions in parks and out door recreation.

In addition, Vining and Orland [20] showed that video presentation could provide equivalent results to photographs, which allowed them the use of manipulated images for controlled experimentation of the effects of environmental changes. Rohrmann and Bishop [21] and Bishop and Rohrmann [22] extended the validity testing to animation and found good relative, but indifferent absolute, correlations with real world responses. More recently, Williams et al. [23] established the validity of animations of forest regrowth in assessment of the acceptability of harvesting techniques. Use of animation can help deal with two potential problematic aspects of the static option: (a) movement of turbines, (b) movement of an individual within the landscape. Neither static images nor animation provide the power of exploration as a component of the environmental experience.

Bishop et al. [24] argued the case for use of virtual landscape environments as a means of gathering experiential responses with greater ecological validity than more traditional psychophysical methods. Since that time, virtual reality has been increasingly used in areas such as behavioural neuroscience [25], [26] and skills training [27]. Given the limitations of static imagery and animations, this paper focuses on the use of approaches which give full freedom to explore the altered environment.

One way to provide for the full environmental experience of wind turbines is through real world exposure. Jallouli and Moreau [28] undertook an in situ evaluation of an existing wind farm with subjects (10 tourists and 8 inhabitants) walking two paths near a seven turbine installation near Plougin in Brittany. One path was in the immediate vicinity (at the foot of the turbines) and the other partly in the intermediate area (more than 1 km distant). The commentary of the subjects was recorded during the walk and analysed in terms of responses to physical factors, space and shapes, participant’s category, the influence of motion, visual perception and acoustic perception. According to Jallouli and Moreau their experiments confirmed the importance of the “influence of motion and of environmental features in human perception” through ‘multi-sensory modalities and dynamics (e.g., temporal dimension, physical factors, and shapes)’ in the way that people perceived space. In other words, it is not sufficient to just show people a picture and expect to understand their range and depth of perceptual responses.

Jallouli and Moreau [29] then compared this in situ experience with a virtual reality experience (which they termed in vitro). They concluded that “despite its limits, VR (virtual reality) restored temporality, perceptions contextualization and dynamic perception”. They argued that VR could be used at different stages and in different ways within wind energy project planning and design: 1) getting used to the nature of a local wind farm, 2) project review with community ideas included from the outset, 3) progressive development of detail building an on-going dialogue, and 4) ensuring that representations are seen as an effective tool but are not treated as reality.

We acknowledge these possibilities but identify more specifically two key areas in which technology can assist in public debate on the environmental effects associated with wind energy. These are:

  • -

    Resolving uncertainty about visual and aural effects of new installations,

  • -

    Providing flexibility in installation design during a consultation process.

Section snippets

Key technologies

Dealing with uncertainty, which will often involve fearing the worst, requires that the development options are simulated both visually and aurally. This simulation must also include the context – which is typical for a visual simulation as the surrounding lands are commonly part of the virtual environment. Audio simulation is however less common, and inclusion of typical ambient sounds even less a part of normal practise. Having created a facsimile virtual environment, people should then have

Virtual environment software

There are many products, both commercial and in the public domain, which can support real-time exploration of landscapes. These include developments from GIS technology (such as VGIS (ERDAS), ArcScene (ESRI)), extensions of landscape animation packages (such as the Scene Express extension of Visual Nature Studio), and specific purpose products such as Polytrim [33], Lenné3D and Biosphere3D [34]. Game engines are also increasingly popular as environments for virtual environment development.

Virtual case study

Our case study is an existing wind farm developed by the company Pacific Hydro in the Challicum Hills area some 150 km west of Melbourne in south-eastern Australia. The farm has 35 generators each of 1.5 MW and was commissioned in 2003. This farm met little local resistance while others in this part of Australia, especially nearer the coast, have been highly controversial (Fig. 1, Fig. 2).

Step one in the planning process is an estimation of the visual impact of the turbines based on visibility

Virtual reality viewer

We use SIEVE Viewer for users to explore a proposed wind turbine farm while allowing them to manipulate individual elements of the environment (e.g., moving objects or adding and deleting objects such as shielding trees). Not only are users able to see the visual parts, but they can also hear wind turbine noise allowing the exploration of visual and noise “pollution” at different distances.

The process usually begins in the GIS by construction of a placement plan of wind turbines on a 2D map.

Collaborative capacity

SIEVE Viewer can be linked with two other running instances, allowing three views of the same area being run next to each other (either on 3 monitors or projected across a screen). These three are synchronised allowing comparison of different scenarios. This can be used in a collaborative environment for guided tours through the study area. A guide can give a tour and gather instant feedback from the audience which is able to compare different scenarios at once.

Different scenarios could include

Augmented reality

SIEVE Viewer also has augmented reality functionality. User can take a laptop and head mounted display into the field and view the planned changes directly on location. SIEVE Viewer synchronises GPS position and orientation with the virtual world [41].

Using SIEVE in the real world may give users a more realistic perspective on proposed changes and may also trigger more emotional responses as the changes may be perceived as more real.

Discussion

Collaborative virtual environments offer several advantages over still images and the classic recursive planning process in which planning and gathering feedback are separated. The advantages include:

  • Instant feedback on visual and audio feedback with moving objects (blades of wind turbines) and moving actors.

  • Greater degrees of freedom – being able to explore multiple points of interest from multiple angles without any restrictions.

  • Exploration of different variables – such as weather conditions

Acknowledgements

The development of SIEVE was funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information under Projects 5.02 and 5.04. Other contributors to development have included Alice O'Connor, Alex Chen, Li Jiang, Haohui Chen, Peter Wang and Subhash Sharma.

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