Sweden aims to achieve 100% renewable electricity by year 2040 with a major share expectation from wind. In this context, the national strategy developed for wind power development estimates expected shares from each County. With this increased expectations from each county, Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis (SMCA) is used as a tool to integrate contributing and conflicting criteria that influence wind energy planning to find sustainable solutions. A majority of studies accommodating larger number of criteria uses Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) or OWA to solve wind farm siting problems. By this, weights obtained from the stake-holders indicating importance of the criteria are used to allow trade-off between criteria to reach a negotiated decision when there are areas not available as in an ideal scenario. Through this opinions of stakeholders from diverse expertise are thus meant to be incorporated in a transparent and democratic way. However, these trade-off may disguise conflicts which need to be handled in a controlled way. 

The REWIND project aims to develop a framework and GIS tools to conduct SMCA for sustainable wind power planning. The study also addresses planning issues that arises when following the standard approach and ways to handle it. 

Two case studies are included in this project with the collaboration of Västernorrland and Västra Götaland Counties. The methodology includes selection of criteria and transformation into a uniform suitability scale. These factors are aggregated through a conflict score, to prevent high trade-offs in later stages.  Secondly, the importance of one factor over the other is obtained from stake-holders through some weighting method. In general, when the number of factors are more than 9, clustering into groups in hierarchical structure (planning tree) is carried out to calculate weights. The basis for the groups varies and the most common way of clustering is based on the three pillars of sustainability. This not only restricts comparison of factors belonging to different clusters, but it also controls the weight distribution indirectly. The symmetricity of the tree and how it impacts final weights are often overlooked by the participants who carry out weighting and their involvement become more or less pointless. To tackle this, the Ranking-Rating (RR) method is developed and used in the framework, where factors are grouped into different level of importance first, then ranked and rated within each group. Finally, the suitability scores of different scenarios are used to identify suitable sites for wind energy planning.

Through this systematic and transparent approach planners are given various options to choose from the decision space with more clear understanding about the trade-offs in a quantified manner.  Moreover rectifying the standard approach where stake-holders can get integrated in the process more effectively can strengthen the strategic planning process and reduce the delays and difficulties during the permitting process. The REWIND methodological framework, also bridges knowledge gaps through integrating and treating diverse factors with stakeholder involvement in useful ways through development the GIS-based tool. The REWIND tool is transferable and can be used for wind power planning on regional and municipal scales.