SRA Logo (print)


Society For Risk Analysis Annual Meeting 2009

Risk Analysis: the Science and the Art

Session Schedule & Abstracts


* Disclaimer: All presentations represent the views of the authors, and not the organizations that support their research. Please apply the standard disclaimer that any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in abstracts, posters, and presentations at the meeting are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other organization or agency. Meeting attendees and authors should be aware that this disclaimer is intended to apply to all abstracts contained in this document. Authors who wish to emphasize this disclaimer should do so in their presentation or poster. In an effort to make the abstracts as concise as possible and easy for meeting participants to read, the abstracts have been formatted such that they exclude references to papers, affiliations, and/or funding sources. Authors who wish to provide attendees with this information should do so in their presentation or poster.

Common abbreviations

Round Table 3 - Tuesday

An Integrated Risk Framework for Gigawatt-Scale Deployments of Renewable Energy: The Wind Energy Case Study

3:30 - 5:00 PM

Organized by: Bonnie Ram

Assessing the potential environmental and human effects of deploying renewable energy along our coastlines and on land requires a new approach. Evaluating potential risks requires a consistent program of research over time that collects relevant data by each sectoral area, such as bat and bird collisions from wind turbines, fragmentation of marine habitats from offshore turbines, and safety on highways and shipping lanes. Risk assessment has been widely applied throughout the federal government and the corporate sector, but the wind community has only applied risk analysis to a few individual sector risks at various sites. This approach typically does not determine what are "acceptable risks." This roundtable (based on a peer reviewed white paper) will discuss an integrated risk framework for evaluating systematically a broad spectrum of environmental and human risks associated with wind energy deployments---both land based and offshore. The paper argues that the wind community is often focusing on one potential impact or "subsystem dominance" such as wildlife risks or radar interference---making one subsystem the whole system --- and typically leads to data collection on a "risk de jour" basis, inaccurate findings, and poor decisions. An integrated risk perspective is a major asset for the wind community as it will not only address important aspects of the broader energy portfolio debate but also will show that wind, as compared with other energy options, is a relatively benign energy supply in terms of its human and environmental risks.

This discussion will begin with a brief presentation about this integrated risk framework and thereafter invite the roundtable participants (3 past Presidents of SRA) to provide their views on why the renewable energy decision makers have not yet viewed risk analysis as valuable and how this risk framework in particular may contribute to a better understanding of potential risks of gigawatt-scale deployment of renewable energy.

The invited roundtable participants:
Robin Cantor, PhD, Principal, Exponent
Robin Gregory, PhD, Decision Research
Roger Kasperson, PhD, Research Professor and Distinguished Scientist, Clark University
Warner North, PhD, North Works, Inc. and Consulting Professor at Stanford University





[back to schedule]