HOLISTIC 360

Stavros Thomas is responsible for developing and executing strategic initiatives to mitigate the CoE for wind

energy facilities and improve social acceptability. He has been involved in development and value engineering

projects to identify and manage risks and establish investments technical and economic viability. He is

experienced in project management and market intelligence methodologies, particularly in advanced

business analysis for investments viability and reputation management. He is also the founder of

Anemorphosis Research Group where he drives overall business strategy and execution in market research,

KPI’s evaluation and standardization of operational tasks. His background spans sectors of the IT and

renewable energy industry and includes high-performance trading platforms development under Waterfall as

well as Agile methodologies for investors and energy traders in Denmark, UK and Greece.

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to Wind Energy Investments 1

HOLISTIC 360

RELIABILITY

Intcompas’s Holistic 360 integrated application suite

supports the full investment life cycle management

across front-, middle- and back-office processes for wind

power companies and asset management firms. Holistic

360 helps firms in achieving economic viability and CoE

mitigation by focusing on improvements in growth,

maintenance and performance, operational efficiency,

risk management and regulatory compliance. The

fundamental logic behind the model can be customized

to include Intcompas’s innovative solutions for portfolio

management and reporting, risk management and supply

chain integrity. Firms can use Holistic 360 as a hosted,

integrated platform, or deploy the individual applications

on a hosted or installed basis.

Business overview

To attract investment, achieve compliance and establish

community acceptance, today’s wind energy developers and

investors need a sound operating model that stands up to

scrutiny from investors and regulators. As approaches to

portfolio management evolve, a firm’s investment

management infrastructure is also playing a more important

role in their design and manufacturing procedures, day-to-

day interactions, performance, business development, risk

management and search for alpha.

With a reliable plan, manufacturers, developers and

stakeholders can operate beyond reproach in the eyes of

investors, prospects and regulators, and show they are a

sound asset opportunity. Through transparent, compliant

operations, reliable data and a precise forecasting, they

can also better manage potential risks, uncertainties and

make intelligent investment decisions. And above all, they

will be able to achieve the all-important, higher state of

“Community acceptance”.

In a global study, Intcompas has identified the

achievement of Community acceptance as one of the

most formidable challenges currently facing the wind

energy industry. In turn, as the research has found, this

higher state of uncertainty and hesitation requires a

significant improvement on stakeholder

motivations/attitudes or their point of view during project

implementation.

By strengthening knowledge sharing and attaining

constructive dialogue across the full investment life-cycle,

wind energy investors can gain the holistic reliability they

need to ultimately achieve profitability and growth.

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to Wind Energy Investments

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to Wind Energy Investments 3

Public acceptance still remains a challenge for wind energy

projects around the world. The most popular explanation

for local opposition, the Not in My Backyard syndrome, has

received much criticism in the past decade. Although

NIMBYism refers to organized opposition to projected land

uses adjacent to existing residential communities, from

upscale shopping malls to educational facilities, it usually

refers to citizen-directed actions aimed at preventing the

development of wind power projects near an existing

residential area. The people behind NIMBY argue that

opposition is not just a matter of selfishness or

unawareness, but that ethical, ecological and aesthetic

values play a central and significant role. To acquire a

holistic view of the ethical, ecological and aesthetic values,

a supplementary bottom-up evaluation process is usually

proposed.

Investigation on this topic emphasizes on stakeholder’s

motivations/attitude and how they behave during project

development. This research proposes Value Sensitive

Design as a standard approach to achieve a conventional,

responsible, socially acceptable implementation of wind

energy and establish a bottom-up analysis about the

technical, social and economic viability of such

investments.

he paper concludes that such a multidimensional oriented

approach is worth exploring further, as a supplement

method rather than a replacement of the process-oriented

approach that is preferred and suggested by the current

literature on community acceptance of wind energy

1. MITIGATE PUBLIC OPPOSITION AND IMPROVE

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT – reduce operating costs and

strengthen infrastructure – improve public acceptance and

knowledge sharing.

2. SUPPORT AND ACCEPTABILITY – manage regulation,

increase transparency and improve prosperity, sustainability, and

welfare

3. IMPROVE GROWTH AND PERFORMANCE – generate assets

alpha, navigate commercialization and optimize investment

performance.

The paper concludes that such a multidimensional oriented

approach is worth exploring further, as a supplement

method rather than a replacement of the process-oriented

approach that is preferred and suggested by the current

literature on community acceptance of wind energy

investments.

4 Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to Wind Energy Investments

› Opposition is a global phenomenon – The large-scale

onshore and especially offshore wind energy projects

remain a common societal, technological, logistic and

technical challenge, despite their potential for providing

sustainable energy to our modern societies. In Greece and

elsewhere issues of social acceptance have meant that

wind energy is increasingly being considered as a

sustainable option with many potential benefits,

including greenhouse and gas emissions reduction, the

diversification of energy supplies and a reduced

dependency on fossil fuel markets (in particular, oil and

gas). However, a research paper by Hagget (2011, p. 503)

concludes that, ‘‘the first offshore wind farms—in the

Great Britain and in other offshore locations around the

world—have not been unrestricted from opposition.’’

Numerous social acceptance concerns for a plethora of

onshore wind energy projects - although ‘‘possibly with

slightly different characteristics than for offshore’’ are

often expressed (Huber and Horbaty 2010, p. 29).

Especially in Greece, considering political goals and

secrecy from the developers, it is not surprising that this

issue of social acceptance of wind energy has received a

lot of attention, both in practice and from researchers.

In an influential article on renewable energy innovation

technologies Wu¨stenhagen et al. (2007) identified three

interconnected forms of social acceptance: socio-political

acceptance (of wind energy in general by governmental

representatives, policy makers and citizens), market

acceptance (by e.g. electricity companies and investors),

and community acceptance (by stakeholders or traders).

DID YOU KNOW: An overwhelming majority of citizens (89%) rate

knowledge sharing and community involvement as “very” or “extremely” important.

Nearly a quarter expect to have a constructive dialogue with

companies’ representatives concerning the potential violation

of the ecological and aesthetic values.

59% see front-to-back holistic involvement as the greatest

direct-return

The implementation of the Value Sensitive Design to wind

power projects could arguably contribute to the overall

project life-cycle improvement - from the perspective of

relevant values such as prosperity, sustainability, and welfare.

By implementing this approach to modern wind power

investments we could significantly improve social acceptance

and community engagement. Moreover, an important

mitigation of the CoE for such types of investments is also

possible.

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to Wind Energy Investments 5

Wind Power and NIMBY

› VSD is based on an assumption that technology

configuration is not value-neutral, and that normally

several alternative technologies-solutions exist for one or

many tasks or activities (Van de Poel 2009). It therefore

aims to pro-actively take into consideration other possible

solutions-tools available throughout the design process.

Due to the fact that ‘wind energy’ is rather broad, with a

significant large number of technologies and life-cycle

phases, one should focus on a particular wind turbine

component or a service or even the wind power facility-

infrastructure as a whole.

The application of Value Sensitive Design methods and

techniques to wind energy plants and wind turbine

generators could (hypothetically speaking) contributes to

more reliable and efficient solutions that are also

acceptable from the communities involved in such

projects.

According to the well-known NIMBY (‘‘Not in My

Backyard’’) syndrome, a significantly large number of

inhabitants -despite their positive attitude towards wind

energy - rejects or opposes a wind power investment in

its geographical vicinity because of the side-effects and

ecosystem degradation associated with such investments. However, especially in Greece, when local resistance

occurs, observers and the social media typically

emphasize on the economic crisis and the strong national

support for a proposed project to meet sustainability and

growth. They describe the opposition as a social

movement being originated by the NIMBY (not-in-my-

backyard) syndrome from other countries (a mimic

syndrome).

Yet they spent time to just describe local resistance while

a reliable explanation about the main causes of this

opposition is always missing. The NIMBY explanation is

often accompanied by authorities and experts judging

local people to be ignorant, irrational or selfish.

Furthermore, describing the opposition to an investment

indicates that the focus of attention should be on the

local resistance, rather than on the general public’s

support.

Several studies suggest that local opposition often relates

to lack of trust in the government, fear of health

consequences and other ideological and cultural reasons

(Aimilia Voulvouli, p81). Moreover (Kempton at al)

discusses that NIMBism is generally used as a pejorative

term, implying selfishness as an underlying cause.

In the past decade or so, however, a range of research

papers and investigations has quite forcefully criticized

the NIMBY syndrome description (see e.g. Wolsink 2006;

Haggett 2011), by showing that people often have non-

selfish and more complicated reasons for their

opposition.

Wolsink (2000), conducted a survey about the values

and parameters that encourage NIMBYism and

concludes that ‘‘most people with NIMBY-feelings are

not so much in favor of wind power at all’’ (p. 54) and

that their support or opposition to a wind power project

will depend primarily on the visual quality of the

[selected] site. The importance of aesthetic value is also

confirmed by a research conducted in Denmark by

Ladenburg and Dubgaard (2007, p. 4068/69) which

‘‘strongly indicates that even if a large proportion of

respondents are unable to see offshore wind farms on a

daily basis the visual disamenities are still perceived as

being important.’’ The confirmation – the fact - of this

important outcome is that the citizens are very much

willing to pay for ‘‘siting wind energy plants further

offshore to reduce the visual disamenities.’’

Besides Ladenburg’s suggestions, the NIMBY syndrome

puts in place selfish intentions to societies and seems to

completely ignore the likelihood that local opposition

may actually be based on a reasonable claim of injustice

and unfairness. Regularly, societal cost-benefit analysis

has an ignorance tendency on whether the benefits and

the costs or risks are fairly and equally distributed over

different groups in society (distributive justice).

Wolsink (2007, p. 1188) for example, concludes that

there is an important ethical issue for many new

technologies of technological projects. Wolsink’s study

underlines that the ‘‘feelings about equity and fairness

appear the determinants of ‘backyard’ motives, instead

of selfishness’’. Perceptions of fairness, says Wolsink

(2007, p. 1203), are amongst others ‘‘strongly connected

with […] core values about how society should take such

decisions, not only within the public, but among all

stakeholders involved in such processes’’ (procedural

6 Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to Wind Energy Investments

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to Wind Energy Investments 7

ENSURE COMPLIANCE, TRANSPARENCY AND INTEGRATION

An empirical evidence that a distinction between acceptance

and support exists presented in several research papers.

Acceptance, so they explain, is a passive response to

something which is proposed externally, and the absence of

active opposition against something is generally taken as a

sign of acceptance. Support, on the other hand, is a more

action-oriented response, where people actually approve of

something and are willing to defend or promote something.

They risk that a narrow focus on merely acceptance might

prevent the sustainability of these technologies in the long

term contribute to maintaining and legitimizing a top-down

planning approach.

› Manage regulation – Regulatory agencies were quick to

respond to the financial crisis and propose a slew of initiatives.

Although some have now been implemented, it is still unclear

exactly what the regulatory landscape will eventually look like.

What is certain is that working within the bounds of regulation

and managing risk effectively are now inextricable. Regulation

and risk management are also the themes cited most often as

challenges by the hedge fund community. Nearly half of Aite

Group’s survey respondents consider dealing with regulatory

issues to be “very” or “extremely” challenging. 38% also see

a lack of technology support for managing regulation to be

“extremely” or “very” problematic.

› Increase transparency – Achieving a desired level of

transparency is the most difficult risk management issue for today’s hedge funds. According to Aite Group, 80% are

experiencing problems of some kind in terms of transparency

and reporting capabilities. For three-quarters, operational

silos are another critical barrier to effective risk management,

hampering enterprise-wide transparency.

› Ensure an integrated approach to risk – When asked by

Aite Group about the top risk-related technology challenges

they anticipate in 2013 and 2014, hedge funds appear to

be troubled by data and IT security, a need for technology

innovation and the deployment of multiple risk to around

the same degree. This lack of commitment to one issue hints

at a fragmented approach to risk management: a potential

problem for more complex hedge funds that operate, for

example, multi-strategy, global macro, credit and capital

arbitrage funds. With separate components of risk

management for different trading strategies, simulation-

versus-factor-based methods, or market-versus-credit-versus-

liquidity risks, it is harder for firms to get the complete view

of risk they need to improve performance.