Renewables—To Build or Not? Czech Approach to Impact Assessment of Renewable Energy Sources with an Emphasis on Municipality Perspective

Abstract

The process of decarbonization and increasing the share of renewable sources of energy (RES) arising not only from European Union targets leads to development, expansion, and construction of new RES. Municipalities thus face a decision whether to support/accept RES projects or not. Although energy managers are part of the municipality management in almost all bigger cities, mayors of smaller municipalities have to go through the decision-making process on their own. The aim of the paper is to present a newly developed approach for mayors and state representatives that helps them implement the process in a user-friendly way. The paper brings a description of an approach to RES impact assessment at a municipal level based on multicriteria analysis. The RES impacts are divided into four categories: economic, social, environmental, and innovation effects. The procedure is demonstrated on an example of assessment of four sources in Czechia.

Keywords

• renewable energy sources
• multicriteria analysis
• municipality impact assessment
• smaller municipality
• decision making
• negotiation between municipality and investor