Renewable energy source (RES) based electrical power plants are widely considered green and clean due to their contribution to decarbonizing the energy sectors. It is apparent that RESs do not produce carbon dioxide, however their significant negative impacts on the environment are still found and cannot be ignored. In this paper, the environmental impacts of RES based power plants are analyzed through a comprehensive review considering solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, ocean current, oceanic wave, ocean thermal, and osmotic effects. Solar thermal power is well known as concentrated solar power. A strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis is carried out and discussed for all RES based power plants. Comparative SWOT analyses for solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power plants are presented. The comparative environmental impact analyses for all existing RES based power plants are tabulated for various attributes. These attributes include but are not limited to human health, noise, pollution, greenhouse gas emission, ozone layer depletion, toxification, flooding, impact on inhabitants, eutrophication, dried up rivers, and deforestation. Based on the analysis, it is found that careful selection of RES for electrical power plants is necessary because improper utilization of RES could be very harmful for the environment. 

Environmental impact of renewable energy source based electrical power plants: Solar, wind, hydroelectric, biomass, geothermal, tidal, ocean, and osmotic

MCDM and GIS based modelling technique for assessment of solar and wind farm locations in India

Multi-criteria decision-making model for optimal planning of on/off grid hybrid solar, wind, hydro, biomass clean electricity supply

Sustainable siting and design optimization of hybrid renewable energy system: A geospatial multi-criteria analysis

Energy management problems associated with rapid institutional, political, technical, ecological, social and economic development have been of critical concern to both national and local governments worldwide for many decades; thus, addressing such issues is a global priority. The main of objective of this study is to provide a review on the application and use of decision making approaches in regard to energy management problems. This paper selected and reviewed 196 published papers, from 1995 to 2015 in 72 important journals related to energy management, which chosen from the “Web of Science” database and in this regard, the systematic and meta-analysis method which called “PRISMA” has been proposed. All published papers were categorized into 13 different fields: environmental impact assessment, waste management, sustainability assessment, renewable energy, energy sustainability, land management, green management topics, water resources management, climate change, strategic environmental assessment, construction and environmental management and other energy management areas. Furthermore, papers were categorized based on the authors, publication year, nationality of authors, region, technique and application, number of criteria, research purpose, gap and contribution, solution and modeling, results and findings. Hybrid MCDM and fuzzy MCDM in the integrated methods were ranked as the first methods in use. The Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review was the important journal in this paper, with 32 published papers. Finally, environmental impact assessment was ranked as the first area that applied decision making approaches. Results of this study acknowledge that decision making approaches can help decision makers and stakeholders in solving some problems under uncertainties situations in environmental decision making and these approaches have seen increasing interest among previous researchers to use these approaches in various steps of environmental decision making process.

A Review of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Applications to Solve Energy Management Problems: Two Decades from 1995 to 2015

A review of multi-criteria decision making applications for renewable energy site selection

Experimental and numerical investigation on an optimization method of heaving buoy wave energy converter arrays based on a given target wave spectrum

Study on the wave energy capture spectrum based on wave height take-off

Study on the energy capture spectrum (ECS) of a multi-DoF buoy under random waves

Numerical simulation on the energy capture spectrum of heaving buoy wave energy converter

Zhi-xin Han

Papers

A review of multi-criteria decision making applications for renewable energy site selection

Experimental and numerical investigation on an optimization method of heaving buoy wave energy converter arrays based on a given target wave spectrum

Study on the wave energy capture spectrum based on wave height take-off

Study on the energy capture spectrum (ECS) of a multi-DoF buoy under random waves

Numerical simulation on the energy capture spectrum of heaving buoy wave energy converter