Assessment of Different Bioenergy Concepts in Terms of Sustainable Development

This chapter focuses on the assessment of different concepts’ sustainability regarding the energetic use of biomass in rural areas. The aim is to provide decision support, while taking environmental, economic, social, and technical perspectives into consideration. Possible (technical and organisational) concepts include biogas plants operated by electric service providers, a single biogas plant owned by a farmer, or bioenergy villages owned by a village cooperative. We describe the development of suitable ecologic, economic, social and technical criteria to assess the sustainability of different concepts and the adaption of existing indicator systems to the special requirements of sustainable biomass use for energy. The results of this sustainability assessment illustrate the different biomass concepts’ advantages and disadvantages, which are compared by means of multi-criteria decision analysis methods. This decision support tool faciliates the decision process for mayors, district administrators, farmers and investors, who have to choose the most sustainable concept for a certain area. Furthermore, the sustainability assessment of bioenergy concepts has specific requirements with regard to their visualisation if such an assessment is to support the decisions of interested stakeholders in communities.