Historic drivers of onshore wind power siting and inevitable future trade-offs

The required acceleration of onshore wind deployment requires the consideration of both economic and social criteria. With a spatially explicit analysis of the validated European turbine stock, we show that historical siting focused on cost-effectiveness of turbines and minimization of local disamenities, resulting in substantial regional inequalities. A multi-criteria turbine allocation approach demonstrates in 180 different scenarios that strong trade-offs have to be made in the future expansion by 2050. The sites of additional onshore wind turbines can be associated with up to 43% lower costs on average, up to 42% higher regional equality, or up to 93% less affected population than at existing turbine locations. Depending on the capacity generation target, repowering decisions and spatial scale for siting, the mean costs increase by at least 18% if the affected population is minimized — even more so if regional equality is maximized. Meaningful regulations that compensate the affected regions for neglecting one of the criteria are urgently needed.