Developing Brownfield Sites for a Holistic Energy Decarbonisation – A Case for Greater Manchester

In the post-COVID era where health, residential and energy have been the mainstream research focus and coupled with the energy crisis that faces Europe, more people have become more aware of their energy consumption and the dire need for a clean energy transition to achieve net-zero goals. In conurbations with dense populations, sufficient clean energy generation is challenging due to spatial resource restrictions. This research combines sustainable energy production with the use of abandoned ‘previously developed land’, termed a ‘brownfield’. The potential of brownfield sites is explored for solar PV, wind turbine and ground source heat pump installation employing multicriteria decision-making method (MCDM) and geographic information systems (GIS), tested for Greater Manchester. Technical, social and environmental parameters are considered, integrating their importance using renewable energy experts' ratings based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and analysed using ArcGIS’s ModelBuilder. Using the proposed framework, the results demonstrate that brownfield sites in Greater Manchester have the potential of being converted into clean energy generator combing solar PV, wind turbines and ground source heat pumps with different criteria weightings, taking advantage of large sites outside the city centre, high wind speed areas and soils with high thermal conductivities. This solution provides lower energy loss due to distribution and generates clean energy closer to highly populated areas for better energy justice.