Comparative Evaluation of Environmental Impacts from Renewable Energy Projects with Agent-Based Modeling

The Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) are mainly qualitative approaches strongly related to the examined projects with special technical characteristics and context-specific parameters. Although the EIA methodology is uniform, the environmental impacts of different infrastructure projects cannot be comparatively evaluated. The purpose of this work is to introduce a practical way to export common and comparable factors related to the environmental impacts of different projects. The agent-based modeling approach is utilized, which can demonstrate the effects of complexity among different factors and, simultaneously, it allows the examination of different conditions of uncertainty through the relevant sensitivity analysis. The proposed framework is applied on two renewable energy projects corresponding to an offshore wind farm in Spain and a complex of two onshore wind farms in Greece. According to the findings, in both cases the majority of impacts are identified in the socioeconomic environment with high divergence in the assigned values and their respective sensitivities. Moreover, the proposed analysis highlights the environmental impacts with high significance and high sensitivity that can potentially jeopardize the reliability of the entire assessment. The proposed methodological approach can practically support the review and the evaluation of alternative solutions by project developers, contracting authorities, and policy makers.