The results on visibility (Fig. 4) are unfavourable to small-scale hydropower plants, especially compared to large-scale hydropower and wind power. As the encroachments from the 27 small-scale hydropower plants are distributed over a large area, the results are not surprising. In small-scale hydropower plants most of the infrastructure is located above surface, and even the penstock/pipeline is often visible from the surface despite being buried (Hagen and Erikstad, 2013). This is in contrast with large hydropower, where much of the needed infrastructure is underground, such as tunnels for water transfer, power house and penstock (Hveding, 1992). Furthermore, the majority of the small plants in this study are located in steep fjord landscapes which often can be seen from large areas. There is a large variation in visibility between the individual small-scale hydropower plants, ranging from 70 m2/MWh to 7399 m2/MWh. The large hydropower plants range from 32 to 34 m2/MWh as the low estimates to 317 m2/MWh as the highest of the three large plants in the dataset. As there are only three large-scale hydropower plants in this study, the results are sensitive to the choice of plants in the dataset. The large differences indicates that there can be considerable potential to reduce the conflicts with the respect to visibility (Hagen and Erikstad, 2013 and Erikstad et al., 2009).