Renewable Energy Suitability Modeling Tools

Description

Interest in renewable energy is growing rapidly and land managers are actively investigating if properties are suitable for development of renewable energy systems in the Mojave Desert region of California. This project focused on photovoltaic solar, concentrating solar, and wind energy as three main renewable energy methods pertaining to the Mojave area. Geographic information systems (GIS) can assess development potential in a specific area by the utilization of a suitability tool. The suitability tools this project produces allow user-defined, feature-importance weighting allocation to data within the model using a ordered weighted average technique. Development of these tools took place in ArcInfo 10 and utilized prebuilt Spatial Analyst tools to process the data. The weighted overlay tool, combined with a Boolean operation, produces a raster file which clearly shows suitable and unsuitable areas using a red, orange, green color scheme. A comparison of the tool outcome to three, actual, facility locations determined the suitability tools correctly sited potential renewable energy areas of the Mojave Desert.

Download the tool (1.55 GB zip file) Online version available on this website soon.

Documents

Final Paper ~ User Conference Presentation ~ User Conference Poster

Screenshots of the model

Videos (Right click and Save Target As to your computer)

MP4 Demo Video ~ WMV Suitability Methods

Contact:

Andrew Orr
aorr@mac.com
406-600-2697