Transmission, turbines, and trust: The social dynamics and narratives of opposition to renewable energy infrastructure in regional Australia

Abstract

Governments around the world are decarbonising their energy systems, resulting in a rapid and widespread buildout of new renewable energy generation, storage, and transmission infrastructure. This effort has encountered opposition, including place-based movements in regional areas required to host the infrastructure. Despite growing attention to renewable energy opposition, little is known about the social dynamics within these movements or what participation in them means for those involved. This study provides new and novel insight into the social dynamics and narratives of a regional Australian anti-renewables movement. Drawing on qualitative data from 19 semi-structured interviews with members of the opposition movement in the Wimmera Mallee region of western Victoria, Australia, we find that the social dynamics present in the movement can be understood as an emerging social identity with attendant social norms, shaped by strong links to place. Within this emerging social identity there is vigilant attentiveness to demarcations between ingroups and outgroups, and meaning provided by narratives that frame renewable energy infrastructure as the physical manifestation of deepening distrust of a range of social others including government, renewable energy proponents, and ‘greenie’ actors. For some, opposition to renewables is an extension of resistance to perceived government overreach that began with responses to COVID-19. Our research reveals that navigating this social conflict requires recognising that opposition to infrastructure extends far beyond technical concerns about transmission towers and turbines, instead encompassing a complex web of trust, social identities, place attachments, and intergroup dynamics.