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.