Aesthetics vs System Costs in Renewable Energy

Reducing the effects of man-made climate change relies heavily on switching from fossil fuels to renewables. While both solar and offshore wind energy have become economically competitive, their current growth is not yet sufficient to meet the 1.5 °C above pre-industrial level targets set out in the Paris Agreement. 

In fact, even though there has been a record capacity expansion in Europe, the growth rates of renewable installations have been rapidly declining due to lengthy regulation processes, supply chain issues, and a lack of grid expansion that can handle such large quantities of renewables entering the grid. 

Even with all the technical challenges of integrating large quantities of renewables into the grid, one of the most prominent barriers is human-driven. Renewables often have opposition from the local population, especially wind turbines due to their size, as they are perceived to have a negative impact on the local landscape. So, aesthetics needs to be considered when trying to implement new large-scale renewable energy projects. 

Increased Opposition to Renewables Due to Aesthetics 

The construction of onshore wind turbines is often opposed by the local populace because of the visual impact they might have. Many turbine installations have been rejected in landscapes that have high aesthetic beauty, but have been accepted a lot more readily in landscapes that are deemed less desirable. 

Solar has received less opposition than wind turbines because it doesn’t generally have such a drastic impact on the local environment. However, large solar farms are still sometimes seen very negatively (and sometimes more than wind turbines) in certain regions because very large farms can be seen as a blight on the landscape. 

The combination of aesthetics with other potential environmental impacts such as noise pollution, threats to wildlife, and the impact on local property prices means that there is often resistance to renewables much closer to the energy source, than away from it. So, careful planning needs to be implemented going forward to ensure that more renewable energy farms get approved to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. 

Investigating How to Balance Renewable Cost and Aesthetics  

The primary method for assessing how the visual landscape will be impacted by new renewable integration is visibility analysis, which creates maps, 3D simulations, and photomontages on the impacts of renewables in a location. While this is the primary method for localised placement and planning, trying to expand the outlook and looking at a much wider scale, such as a regional or national scale, is difficult with these methods. 

This is because this method uses a viewshed calculation, which determines the area visible from a specific point using a line-of-sight test. For this test, all the potential locations need to be determined first, and while this is fine for local analyses, it is not possible for large areas. However, it is possible to look at larger areas by reversing the setup of the viewshed analysis, i.e. the analysis is performed looking at which landscape areas need to be protected, rather than looking at it from a project-based lens. 

Researchers have recently used this approach for a study based in Germany to assess the potential impacts of renewable placement on a nationwide scale. The study aimed to ask the following questions: 

• Will renewables that are not visible from densely populated areas encounter a lot less local opposition? 
• If so, what are the costs associated with their design and installation? 

The study in Germany first looked at all the populated and scenic areas via reverse viewsheds, using wind turbines with a 130 m hub height and PV plants with a 2 m height as the renewable energy systems to be installed. 

The Cost of Placing Renewables Out of Sight 

The study showed that even though it would prevent opposition from locals, placing renewable energy technologies out of sight in areas with an average scenic beauty and population density would be more expensive. However, placing renewables out of sight of the most scenic and densely populated areas was found not to have much of an impact on the system costs. It was also found that there was a preference for deploying an open-field solar farm over onshore wind turbines due to a lower visual impact. 

Balancing Aesthetics with Economic Impact

The analysis scenarios that assumed a high sensitivity from the locals to the visual impacts of the renewables placed both the onshore wind turbines and open-field solar farms out of sight from the average person, to see the cost and system impacts if this became the norm in the future. It was found that placing the renewables out of sight showed that the annual energy system costs would increase by up to 38% by 2045. 

To facilitate a scenario where the renewables are out of sight for the average person would, however, require a number of logistical challenges, alongside the higher energy costs. On one hand, there would have to be a mass adoption of both offshore wind and rooftop solar panels to stop large farms from being built in scenic areas. It’s estimated that 18 times the current rooftop solar capacity, around 618 GW, would be required by 2045 to stop renewables being seen on scenic landscapes by the average person across Germany. 

This expansion of rooftop solar would have to progress at an installation rate of 29 GW per year, for every year, until 2045 to meet energy demands. However, in Germany, the current expansion rate for both rooftop and open-field solar cells is only 7.5 GW per year, so it’s debatable whether the necessary levels of scaling would be reached. It’s also optimistic to assume that all building owners will adopt solar cells due to high upfront costs and unclear ownership between tenants and landlords in rented buildings. 

There will also be a need to move wind turbines offshore in scenarios where the population are highly sensitive to the sight of renewables. While this would reduce their visual impact and improve aesthetics, it’s unknown what environmental and wildlife impact this may have on locations that are seen day to day by people. 

Infrastructure and Policy Challenges Ahead 

The other issue, outside of cost, of trying to hide renewables from sight, is that there will also be a reliance on green hydrogen imports from 2025 onwards. There is a chance that the supply chain may turn to non-renewables to produce hydrogen if the demand is too great, increasing its carbon footprint. However, the model showed that in Germany, if domestic hydrogen was used in the efforts to take away visible renewables, then it would significantly increase the overall system costs. It’s thought that biomass could potentially be made domestically as a more cost-effective source of domestic hydrogen. 

The study has showed that in a future scenario where the average person has a ‘moderate’ consideration of the aesthetics, but are not as extremely sensitive to the visual impact, then there won’t need to be many changes made to the current planning approaches, and these future scenarios wont affect the costs, energy potential or the need for a change in the design of energy systems. 

However, the future scenarios detailed above show what might happen if people in different regions have very strong opinions about the visual impact of renewables, and this would cause a systematic change where new, more costly technologies would need to be implemented, but a one-size-fits-all policy approach could be ineffective at the local level, so dynamic planning to meet the needs of different regions might be needed. 

Global Variations in Impact and Feasibility

So, while it will be theoretically possible to remove renewables from sight for many people, it does come with a higher cost and a need for systematic change in the energy sector, as well as potential environmental impacts and human socio-economic challenges. It’s also possible that the costs and design challenges will vary from country to country, so while Germany would potentially be affected in the ways noted above, every country could be different, as there are many countries where onshore wind is utilised in remote areas, so not considering them as part of the future energy grid could be more costly than other approaches.  

Regardless of the country, the study has highlighted that careful planning will be needed to consider the visual impact of renewables in different areas against the potential costs and systematic changes to develop socially acceptable, but commercially feasible, renewable energy sources that could help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the carbon footprint of different countries. 

Reference: 

Tsani T. et al, Quantifying the trade-offs between renewable energy visibility and system costs, Nature Communications¸, 16, (2025), 3853.