Report

SCBA of Lage Weide wind farm

Both tiers of Utrecht’s local government (Mayor and Aldermen, City Council) have given the go-ahead for achieving CO¬2 neutrality by 2030. Under the programme ‘Utrecht’s Energy!’ the aim is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by the year 2020. One element of this programme is the Lage Weide wind farm, an initiative of the Energie-U cooperative. In order to come to a robust and integral assessment of the pros and cons of the various alternatives (for incorporation in the ‘draft structural vision’) a social cost-benefit analysis (SCBA) was carried out, a method for charting all a project’s economic effects (also known as welfare impacts). To enable comparison, as far as possible these effects have been expressed in monetary terms.