Sustainable Project Management System for Renewable Energy Infrastructure: An Integrated Risk-Quality-Sustainability Governance Framework

One of the major structural challenges to the successful implementation of renewable energy infrastructure projects in the European Union is fragmented governance. Although risk management, quality assurance, and sustainability performance are covered separately based on the established standards and models, such as ISO 31000, ISO 9001, and ISO 14001, there is no validated and operationally integrated framework that reflects systemic dependencies of these areas on the project level. This paper introduces the sustainable project management system (SPMS), which is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)-based governance framework that is aimed at simultaneously resolving the risk exposure, quality-assurance maturity, and sustainability governance issues throughout the renewable energy project lifecycle. Based on a risk-quality-sustainability (RQS) interlinkage analysis of offshore wind and utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the EU, the study finds the cascading governance failure pathways and constructs a nine-criterion scoring architecture, which is tested on three cases in Europe: an offshore wind project in Denmark, a utility-scale solar PV facility in Spain, and a geothermal/hybrid project in Italy. Findings show that there are regular improvements of 80‒117 % in the integrated value score (IVS) in all cases in the event of SPMS governance application, with the highest improvements obtained in the sustainability area. Its SPMS is placed as an analytical diagnostic focus, as well as a decision-support framework in line with EU Taxonomy, Fit-for-55 targets, and Sustainable Development Goals. The article adds an empirically based, scalable governance structure to the body of literature on project management and renewable energy, and has implications applicable to policy-making, developers, and regulators working on the European energy transition.