Social acceptance toward constructing a combined heat and power plant near people's dwellings in South Korea

Both nuclear and coal-fired power plants and much of renewable energy are being or will be built in areas far away from the demand for electricity in South Korea. Since social conflicts over building power transmission facilities are growing, the government is trying to increase distributed energy sources including combined heat and power (CHP). This article gathered data on the social acceptance toward constructing a CHP plant near people's dwellings on a 9-point scale from a survey of 1000 people, and identified and investigated the factors affecting the social acceptance adopting an ordered probit model. 54.0% and 12.7% of all interviewees agreed with and opposed to the construction of a CHP plant near their dwellings, respectively, with the former being about 4.3 times more than the latter. The model secured statistical significance and various findings emerged from the results. For example, people who were living in the Seoul Metropolitan area, people with a small number of family members, old people, high-educated people, and high-income people were more receptive to the construction than others. Moreover, several implications derived during the survey were discussed from the perspective of enhancing the social acceptance.