| The development of a centralized electric energy infrastructure in industrialized areas of the world has significantly impacted the character and nature of local and regional landscapes. Since their development at the beginning of the 20th century, electric energy networks have become one of the most distinctive and visible landscape features found in industrialized regions today. At the same time, our perceptual relationship with the electric energy infrastructure, along with the meanings we ascribe to these electricity-related landscape features, has shifted dramatically over the last century. The early stages of the historical development of the electric energy infrastructure in the United States and Europe were marked by an optimistic popular perception that celebrated electricity's vast potential as an economic and social transformative agent. However, by the end of the 20th century, concerns in these industrialized regions over environmental degradation and resource scarcity significantly altered these popularized political and aesthetic judgments. Ironically, the recent growth of renewable energy projects, in particular large-scale wind energy facilities, while seeking to ameliorate the industrial causes of environmental degradation, has sparked an intense public debate over the visual impacts of these projects on local landscapes. To understand this shifting perceptual relationship between industrialized societies and the electricity landscapes found in these regions, in this dissertation I analyze the evolving social, economic and political milieu underlying the creation and reproduction of meanings ascribed to the visual landscape modifications spawned by the electricity network. In addition, I describe the political conditions and trends that are shaping and contextualizing the role of renewable electric energy facilities in the future electricity budgets of the United States and the EU. To address the concerns over negative visual impacts of renewable electric energy development, I propose the creation of regional or intra-regional agencies whose goal is to coordinate renewable energy sitting and planning regulations. Finally, I present a case study of a proposed wind electric energy project that I am developing in Puerto Rico whose design and economic model seeks to address the concerns over negative landscape effects that I present throughout this dissertation. |
