Speaker
Description
Due to the ongoing climate crisis, development of geothermal energy technologies will need to increase to support an energy transition. Community engagement around geothermal energy is an important facet of sectoral development. Geothermal project developers will need to conduct engagement to successfully develop projects which, depending on the approach adopted, could facilitate wider societal change by empowering publics through early and consequential inclusion. Throughout engagement, project developers often need to interact with communities with unique and complex relationships with their places. Existing research has focused on how these relationships inform how communities receive projects and project developers. How project developers interact with communities and their place relationships is comparatively under-researched, resulting in literature dominated by one side of a two-way interaction.
Here, we report on the findings from a PhD study conducted in partnership with the British Geological Survey: Place Relationships in Geothermal Project Developer Approaches to Engagement, which addresses this research gap. It investigated how project developers experience and interpret theoretical understandings of place relationships. Qualitative data was collected through 32 interviews, and workshops with staff that delivered engagement between 2017-2021 for three projects in the nascent UK geothermal sector: UKGEOS Cheshire, UKGEOS Glasgow, and the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power Project.
The study found that geothermal project developers construct narratives portraying successful implementation of geothermal projects as aligned with place histories by following an identified characteristic (e.g. historic mining culture or industrial heritage) through time. Developers establish boundaries for engagement using geographical and social perimeters which evolve as developers experience communities, and interpret interactions with communities as ‘concern’ with their project. We recontextualise ‘concern’ as attempts to ascertain if place relationships will be negatively impacted by the project. We end with four practical recommendations for developers regarding engagement: 1) Clarify and Consider Engagement Early, 2) Scope the Surface as well as the Subsurface, 3) Take Publics Seriously to Mitigate Place-Washing in Top-Down Engagement, and 4) Create an Organisation Trained to Engage, and briefly signpost ongoing work on the topic in the UK and across the EU.
