Scoring system for onshore wind proposals devised

A new European study has developed a scoring system that could help authorities decide whether wind farm proposals are suitable for the proposed location. Four aspects of a wind farm proposal are assessed: the technical properties, the social impact, the environmental impact and the share of earnings offered as compensation for any negative effects.

The EU Climate Change and Energy Package 1 has set a number of targets to be met by 2020, including 20 per cent of EU energy consumption to come from renewable resources. Wind power is an important source of renewable energy but onshore wind farms are also associated with negative effects, such as their visual and sound impact.

Before approving a wind farm, public bodies evaluate its benefits and costs through a form of Environment Impact Assessment (EIA). However, EIAs do not always capture the different impacts and their interactions.

The research established a single scoring tool to measure the net benefit associated with the building and running of wind plants. It considered the local environmental impact, the economic compensation for local communities, the technical characteristics of the plant, the social impact of the project and the interaction between these four elements.

The economic compensation is calculated as a percentage of the expected income from the wind farm, based on the forecast of the wind supply. The technical impact indicates whether it can guarantee a certain amount of power for a given wind supply and is represented by the full 'load hours' of each turbine.

A load hour is an hour in which a wind turbine produces energy at full capacity. Lastly, the social impact of the plant is represented by the number of new employees hired by each wind farm.

The research devised an equation to score the wind farm proposals from these four elements. Depending on the context of the decision, the public body could place different emphasis on different elements.

It is thought that the formula might be useful to compare wind farm proposals and use a threshold to evaluate the acceptability of projects.