Integrated Decision Support for the Sustainability Assessment of Low Carbon Energy Options in Europe

The PhD research aims at developing and applying a hybrid weighting methodology for the elicitation of local stakeholders’ preferences regarding an integrated set of sustainability and resilience evaluation criteria during the assessment of low-carbon energy technologies. The overall methodology has been applied and tested for the integrated sustainability evaluation of selected low-carbon energy technologies in Europe from a local stakeholders’ and local governments’ perspectives. The researcher developed and applied a hybrid weighting methodology based on different Multiple Criteria Analysis (MCA) techniques to test the consistency of stakeholders’ preferences. The methodology was piloted based on a smallscale European local stakeholders’ survey within the framework of Covenant CapaCITY, an Intelligent Energy Europe project, but also through another survey among 32 main European local governments. It became evident that the local stakeholders and governments who participated placed high priorities on aspects such as CO2eq emissions reduction, ecosystem damages reduction, and resilience to climate change during the evaluation of low-carbon energy technologies. Considering the overall energy technologies integrated assessment, wind off-shore, solar photovoltaic, hydropower, and wind on-shore achieved the highest scores and better reflected the priorities of local stakeholders considering a large set of multiple sustainability and resilience criteria.