Long Term Evaluation of EIA Reports for Onshore Wind Farms

The wind energy sector has increased significantly over the last decades, above all in Europe where the total capacity grew from 2.5 GW in 1995 to over 142 GW in 2015, most of which is in form of onshore wind farms.
This growth and more generally the development of all sustainable energies, is increasingly being supported, also because during the past years it has been possible to balance the environmental protection necessary for along-term survival with an economical development.

In order to balance this, the process of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was introduced in the USA around the 70’s and then adopted by the European Community (EC) in 1985. The EIA is a systematic way to examine and assess the impact that different development actions has on the environment, before the development project is decided and executed. In the EIA process different steps are included; screening of projects to define possible impact and the need for an EIA, impact prediction, mitigation and presentation of findings from the EIA.
During all these steps, the participation of the public is crucial. For this reason, the EIA should be considered an iterative process in which there has to be an important interaction among all steps.

But inviting the public into the EIA process is also where conflicts regarding location, nature protection and respect of landscape, between authorities, developers and other stake holders, e.g. neighbors often start. These conflicts lead to many planning appeals and complaints, which delays the planning process. To avoid these delays, it is important that the EIA process is fine-tuned and addresses possible areas of conflicts to eliminate doubts andc oncerns.
The EIA is a very important planning and decision tool, and working with this and improving EIAs to make planning effective, smooth and perhaps faster, is a continous process. One important thing in improving things is to evaluate the present state. This is apparantly not done in a structured way for wind energy projects.