This project encompasses estimating renewable energy potential, analyzing conflict factors associated with renewable energy, and assessing the sustainability of renewable energy siting.
Wind energy has become one of the most popular renewable energy sources and has been developed in many areas in Japan. However, wind energy installations can generate social conflicts due to forest destruction, disaster risk, noise, landscape degradation, etc. Following the revision of Japan's Act on Promotion of Global Warming Countermeasures, local municipalities have been working to establish siting restriction criteria for renewable energy projects. The Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan is developing support systems such as REPOS and EADA. However, some open issues remain for better renewable energy planning. Our renewable energy site selection project started in 2025. This project encompasses estimating renewable energy potential, analyzing conflict factors associated with renewable energy, and assessing the sustainability of renewable energy siting. In this presentation we focus on the sustainability assessment. A prototype of a renewable energy siting evaluation tool was developed based on the k.LAB platform, which is developed in the ARIES (ARtificial Intelligence for Environment & Sustainability) project by the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) in Spain. Resource Time Footprint (RTF) was used as the sustainability assessment metric. Firstly, RTF was applied to assess the impact of material use, land occupation, labor use and pollution emission based on a LCA inventory. Then, the environment, social and disaster risk assessment for renewable energy siting was conducted. The target renewable energy source for this study is onshore wind power.
He is a professor of Nagoya University, Japan, He measures in environmental assessment and ecosystem evaluation.