Renewable energy Nexus: Interlinkages with biodiversity and social issues in Japan

Abstract

Renewable energy is one of the most important sources of energy for a decarbonized future. The use of renewable energy necessitates the thorough study of interlinkages with social issues such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, there are no high-resolution renewable energy datasets for analyzing interlinkages. The goal of this research is to 1) create a high-resolution geographically explicit renewable energy potential map, 2) evaluate the SDGs nexus using the potential map, 3) discuss the improvement of renewable energy dataset, and 4) discuss nexus issues for implementing renewable energy systems in Japan. Our potential map has the same resolution of 500 m and unit of annual electricity generation on each energy. The occurence of endangered birds was overlapping with the area having a lot of solar energy potential. Local renewable energy is difficult to access on a small spatial scale, especially in urban regions like Tokyo. Our potential map can be used as a database for site selection and area zoning. The findings suggest that implementing decentralized renewable energy systems in today's highly concentrated megacities, such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, is extremely challenging, and that this type of centralized-oriented land design is likely to exacerbate the problem of energy poverty.

Keywords

• Renewable energy map
• Endangered birds
• Energy access
• Energy poverty
• Decision support