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Rural areas are critical venues for scaling up renewable energy (RE) development in the United States. Yet, data show rural Americans to be less supportive of government policies that promote RE development than urban Americans. Existing accounts have yet to provide adequate explanations for this rural–urban divide in support for RE policy. Drawing on precinct-level data from the 2020 Nevada State General Election, we examine the relative support for a statewide renewable portfolio standard (RPS) across rural and urban precincts. We find that rural precincts were significantly less supportive of RPS than urban precincts. Importantly, this pattern persists even after controlling for precinct-level partisanship as well as its distance to the closest RE projects. We conclude by discussing a possible mechanism that may lead rural residents to be especially averse to RE policy.
Ko et al. (Mon,) studied this question.