Conflicts between decentralized renewable electricity production and landscape services – a spatially-explicit quantitative assessment for Switzerland

The production of decentralized renewable electricity often collides with provisioning, regulating and cultural services of the landscape. In this paper we operationalize the landscape service approach and generate conflict maps between three renewable energies (wind; PV; forest biomass) and six competing landscape services (nutrition and materials; aesthetics; physical and experiential interactions; heritage and symbolic content; water and liquid flows; lifecycle maintenance, habitat and gene pool protection). Media content analysis and expert interviews were used to ground-truth the national conflict maps in several Swiss regions and to understand to what degree the national conflict assessments match the regional and local perceptions of these conflicts. In Switzerland (approximately 40,000km2) biomass from forests is by far the least conflicting renewable energy, followed by PV on roofs. For the latter 68% of the technically feasible energy potential can be generated with low conflicts, and more is expected with new materials. Wind has a high conflict potential: only 12% of the technically feasible energy potential is low conflict. PV on open land, marginal land and shrubland, is – at the moment – not currently feasible in Switzerland. The accuracy of our conflict assessment is sufficiently high to estimate the proportion that socially sustainable energy could cover of the overall energy gap of 22–25TWh/yr caused by the phase-out of Swiss nuclear plants by 2050. Low-conflict solar energy from rooftops could contribute approximately 30% of the required 22–25TWh/yr. Intensified wood production and wind energy could add another 40%. The gap of approximately 30% must come from undisputed energy sources such as biogas from recycled organic material, from centralized renewable energies such as geothermal or large hydropower, or from new or technologically improved renewable energies. The presented decision support tools are a timely contribution to the designation of legally binding zones for renewable energy production.

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