Renewable Energy Siting Research for the Siting Resource Center

The capstone studio at the University of Michigan provides an active learning experience on urgent planning problems and supports organizations and community partners that lack the resources necessary to undertake these problems. Our capstone class, composed of 12 Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning graduate students in their final semester, participated in a collaborative, client-based project that mirrors real-world planning work as a culmination of our degree. We conducted this project in partnership with our client, the Siting Resource Center (SRC), a national initiative that supports stakeholders in renewable energy siting and permitting. Our project aimed to support SRC in providing effective and informed guidance for decision-makers relating to renewable energy siting. To achieve this goal, we focused on improving how existing knowledge is organized, interpreted, and applied in planning contexts, with particular attention paid to making complex and fragmented information more accessible and decision-relevant for planners, local governments, and communities.

In this project, we produced a structured set of resources to support SRC’s information hub, including adding resources to a curated database and a series of planning-oriented factsheets. The research database SRC developed using Airtable compiles vetted sources organized by topic, technology, and metadata tags, enabling users to efficiently filter and assess information based on credibility, relevance, and applicability. Over the course of the semester, we added an additional 444 resources to the database. In parallel, we developed 26 factsheets addressing priority questions related to renewable energy siting. These topics span a wide range of renewable energy planning concerns, including environmental impacts (e.g., wildlife, soil and water systems), community and economic effects (e.g., costs and benefits, sense of place), infrastructure and safety considerations (e.g., noise, fire risk, and aviation interference), and governance and lifecycle issues (e.g., permitting authority and decommissioning). Each factsheet synthesizes existing research, identifies areas of consensus and uncertainty, and highlights limits of applicability, while also incorporating a planner-oriented perspective on how these issues can be understood and addressed in practice. We also researched 18 additional topics.

Across topics, we found the main challenge in renewable energy siting is the difficulty of synthesizing fragmented, context-dependent knowledge into forms that support decision-making. Effective synthesis requires interpreting variability, uncertainty, and trade-offs in ways that are accessible and actionable for planners. At the same time, we encountered key limitations, including uneven evidence across topics, particularly for emerging technologies such as battery energy storage, and the inherent tension between simplifying complex issues and preserving necessary nuance. These findings underscore the need for tools that bridge technical knowledge and planning practice, while remaining transparent about uncertainty and context-specific applicability.