Analysis of renewable energy and agro-food by-products in a rural landscape: the Energyscapes.

Renewable energy sources currently play an increasingly crucial role that, owing to their spatial and high temporal variability, need a careful planning approach to develop a flexible spatio-temporal analysis framework. From an energy point of view, thanks to its morphological, agricultural and environmental structure, a regional territory, such as the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy), can be considered as an interesting case study, since it is characterized by significant sources of renewable energy (biomass, wind, solar, hydro, etc.). This paper presents an analysis of the spatial supply and relationships between renewable energy potentials and rural land through the use of a Geographical Information System, implemented with the aim to analyze the energy usability, and to investigate the influence of unutilized biomass resources for bioenergy production, such as agro-food by-products, that are often spread on the territory and need to be collected and transported to conversion plants. The study is carried out to bridge the gap between energy modelling and spatial planning, by integrating research and techniques in energy systems within a more general environmental and landscape framework. The concept of “Energyscape” may be considered as a spatial and temporal combination of the supply, demand and infrastructure for energy. The temporal and spatial aspects, linking the biomass resource, the biomass by-product, the conversion plant size and the environmental impacts, are the starting point to simulate an interdisciplinary analysis able to define the importance of the spatial arrangement for decisions on energy plant localization, enabling to figure out optimal solutions in decision-making processes and in spatial planning.