Landscape Assessment and Economic Accounting in Wind Farm Programming: Two Cases in Sicily

Salvatore Giuffrida,Filippo Gagliano,Francesco Nocera,Maria Trovato

doi:10.3390/land7040120

Abstract

In recent years, the scientific interest for the economic and landscape impact of wind farms has increased. This paper presents a useful GIS tool that allows for helping policymakers and investors to identify promising areas for wind power generation as well as landscape impact and financial and economic sustainability of wind farms. The results of the research carried out for exploring the potential for wind energy in two territorial contexts of Sicily region are presented with the particular look at the possibilities of economic developing, stakeholders’ opportunities and obstacles in the policy, legal, and regulatory framework.

Highlights

According to the proposed methodology, taking as sample the case of Siracusa, in the first phase, decision-making rules are extracted from a decision-making model that was implemented to represent decision-making rules are extracted from a decision-making model that was implemented to the preference structure of a Decision Maker Expert Group (DMEG); this structure is proposed to represent the preference structure of a Decision Maker Expert Group (DMEG); this structure is the Decision Makers Local Stakeholders (DMLS) who was asked to declare his preferences (Table 5)
The mission of the Science of evaluations, an operational discipline that is closely linked to the issues of distributive equity of the transformations of local environmental and territorial contexts, is to integrate a multiplicity of evaluation tools within a vision inspired by the combination of “ethics of landscape “and “ aesthetics of economy”
The first, more general, concerns the need to free ourselves from the fossil supply chain, given the extensive and uncontrollable ramification in space and time of its catastrophic effects, environmental, and and above all socio-economic; and, the second, more directly connected with the shape of the territory, is given by the consumption of soil that every form of “self-sufficient solidarity”—that is the self-production of the energy that is consumed—can provoke, and the consequent impacts

Summary

Introduction

The Climate and Energy package passed by the European Union (EU) to meet the goals of the Kyoto Protocol with the intention of preventing climate instability, known as the 20 20 20 Plan (Directive 2009/29/EC) [1], provides for joint action on CO2 emission levels (−20%), energy production from renewable sources (+20%) and primary energy saving (−20%) by the end of 2020, with a commitment to reduce emissions by 50% to the end of 2050 The outline of these courses of action considers local and business policies—carbon footprint measurements of products, RET (Renewable Energy Target) incentives, CO2 compensation through urban forestation, as well as environmental, energy, and climate education and training. Since these are joint economic, territorial, and landscape issues, there are two main issues that planners and Decision Makers in this sector must address: on one hand, the amount of installed power that Sicily can/must provide, and, on the other, the location/size of the plants

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Conclusion