Abstract
In response to climate change, European Union directive set the goal of 20% share of renewable energy sources in the final energy consumption in 2020 to mitigate the CO2 emissions. The Czech Republic has committed to the goal of 13%.
Based on the Czech National Action Plan, Ministry of Industry and Trade expects to exceed this goal. There are a number of studies evaluating the impacts of constructing renewable energy sources (RES) at national level, which provide information about impacts on GDP or employment.
These cover mostly the macro-economic level. Alternatively, the method of regulatory impact assessment (RIA) may be used.
Another group of studies and analyses consists of environmental impact assessment (EIA), which is applied to evaluate the impact of construction of a specific resource. None of the above mentioned methods cover the complex assessment of the implementation of RES at the regional/local level.
Given the wide variety of impacts (ranging from the impact on employment and municipal budget to the environmental impact), impact assessment on local level is a difficult task for decision-makers. To overcome these challenges, Regional impact assessment framework (RegioIAF) was developed.
This method is based on a combination of RIA, EIA, LIA (local impact assessment) and multi-criteria analysis. The size of the positive/negative impact is determined for specified categories such as employment, regional GDP, revenues for municipality and environment.
The main user of the RegioIAF will be the mayor who faces the decision, whether to build a renewable energy source or not.