System-level impacts of landscape scenicness on onshore wind deployment in a decarbonized European energy system

Abstract Onshore wind is pivotal to Europe’s decarbonization, yet its expansion increasingly faces social constraints due to landscape impacts that are rarely captured in energy system models. This study presents a Europe-wide integration of landscape scenicness, which is used as a proxy for potential landscape impact, into a calibrated, multi-sector energy system model that explores policy interactions with enhanced capacity-factor granularity. Building on a machine-learning–based scenicness dataset linked to wind resource assessment, and an enhanced representation of wind technologies with fine capacity-factor granularity, we quantify how landscape scenicness preservation affects onshore wind deployment and system-wide outcomes across 27 European Union member states. Results show that moderate scenicness protection has limited impacts, while stringent protection disproportionately removes high-capacity-factor wind sites, particularly in mountainous and coastal regions. This reduces the number of potential low-cost wind sites and induces techno-economic substitution toward solar photovoltaics in the model. A reduction in onshore wind capacity intensifies competition among uses of clean electricity, including direct electrification, hydrogen, and other renewable synthetic fuels. The presence or relaxation of intermediate EU climate and energy policy targets has a stronger effect than scenicness constraints alone. These findings demonstrate that coordinated policy design remains the dominant lever for achieving a secure, socially acceptable, and cost-effective European energy transition, and wind emerges as a key contributor to the effectiveness of policy implementation. A limitation should be highlighted that the solar substitution should be interpreted as a system-level compensation potential rather than an unconstrained deployment pathway.