The Consent Crisis: Why Local Opposition Became a First-Order Siting Risk
For most of the last century, siting was an engineering and economics problem: find the load, the land, the water, the transmission, and the tax deal, and the permits followed. That order has inverted. Today the scarce input is not megawatts or acreage — it is community consent. When a county board can stall a gigawatt campus for three years, and a single crowded hearing can strand a billion dollars of committed capital, opposition stops being a public-relations footnote and becomes the binding constraint on where infrastructure can physically go. The projects that win are no longer the ones with the best spreadsheet; they are the ones that earned permission before they needed it. Price consent as the first-order risk it has become, or watch better-financed rivals lose to it anyway.
Knowledge check
Why does the module argue that community consent has become a 'first-order' siting risk rather than a manageable public-relations concern?
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Because opposition can now independently determine whether a project is built at all. By introducing delay through zoning study, moratoria, litigation, and referendum, it can strand fully-financed, technically-sound projects whose economics depend on a schedule. Consent therefore behaves like a hard input constraint — land, water, power — that can veto a site, not a soft reputational cost to be handled after the site is chosen.