Vindval, 10 Years of Experience from the Swedish Research Programme on the Environmental Impact of Wind Energy

Vindval is an applied research programme that has a unique setup in Sweden. It's aim is to facilitate the processes around planning and permitting for wind energy plants. It is run a s a cooperation between the Swedish Energy... [ view full abstract ]

Vindval is an applied research programme that has a unique setup in Sweden. It's aim is to facilitate the processes around planning and permitting for wind energy plants. It is run a s a cooperation between the Swedish Energy agency and the Environmental protection agency.
The main idea was to gather knowledge from the early parks that were granted construction subsidies at that time. The organisation includes close cooperation with stakeholders such as people working in the permitting processes or preparing material for ut. In addition to the effects on wild life, the programme also looks into the effects on humans and the interests of people.

From the start, very little was known about environmental impact of wind and the common belief was that expansion would be large offshore. Therefore projects were initiated in order to study marine environments.

Some years later it had turned out that onland sites were of greater interests than offshore and focus for studies changed to forests and mountains. It also became clearer that there is already a great portion of knowledge but it could be contratictionary and difficult to put it in a context. By that time the solution was to identify expert panels and put together synthesis reports on the topics wind energy and land living mammals, wind energy and the effects on birds and bats, Wind energy and the effects on marine life, Wind energy and the effects on people's interests.

In the third period it was concluded that we know enough to say that we can continue the expansion of wind power without putting the environment at a great risk if we apply the available knowledge. Studies are conducted to make use of available data from monitoring programs and focus is updating and completing previous work. A new area is how to measure societal benefit from wind projects.

As the program has been running for 10 years now, there is a substantial amount of knowledge collected and communicated. There are also interesting experiences gained on how to run an applied research programme for specific purposes in a complex context of numerous different interests.