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How to deal with complexity in regional impact assessment of Renewable energy sources?

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2017

Abstract

In the reaction on climate change, European Union directive set the goal of 20% share of renewable energy sources in the final energy consumption till 2020 to mitigate the CO2 emissions. Czech Republic committed to the goal of 13%.

Based on the Czech National Action Plan Ministry of Industry and Trade expects to overcome this goal. There are a number of studies evaluating the impacts of renewable energy source (RES) building at national level which provide information about impacts on GDP or employment.

These cover mostly the macro-economic level. Alternatively, the method of regulatory impact assessment (RIA) is used.

Another group of studies and analysis consists of environmental impact assessment (EIA), which is applied to evaluate the impact of construction of a specific resource. None of the above-mentioned methods cover the complex assessment of the implementation of RES at the regional/local level.

Given the wide range of impacts (starting with the impact on employment, municipal budget and ending the environment impact) impact assessment on local level is a difficult task for decision-makers. To overcome this challenges Regional impact assessment framework (RegioIAF) was developed.

This method is based on combination of RIA, EIA and LIA (local impact assessment) and multi-criteria analysis. The rate of the positive/negative impact is determined for specified categories such as employment, regional GDP, revenues for municipality and environment.

The main user of the RegioIAF would be the mayor who stands in front of the decision whether to build a renewable energy source or not.