Wind Farm Siting

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Wind Farm Siting

• Dennis Scanlin
• (Department of Technology)
• Xingong Li
• Chris Larson
• (Department of Geography Planning)
• Appalachian State University

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Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE)

• Evaluates a number of alternatives in the light
  of multiple criteria / factors.
• Factor scores of the alternatives
• Factor weights
• Relative importance of the factors
• Ranking scores of the alternatives
• Weighted combination of factors

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Analytic Hierarchy Process

• Determines factor weights
• Difficult to determine factor weights (numbers)
  directly
• Derives weights by comparing the relative
  importance between two factors

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AHP Factor Weights Determination

• Factor relative importance pairwise comparison
  (9-point scale)
• 1equally importance
• 3moderately more importance
• 5strongly more importance
• 7very strongly more importance
• 9extremely more importance
• The best weights fit into the pairwise
  comparisons.

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Spatial Analytical Hierarchy Process

• Wind farm siting
• Find the best wind farm sites based on siting
  factors
• Alternatives
• Locationinfinite
• Divide the space into squares/cells (200m 200m)
• Evaluate each cell based on the siting factors

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Preliminary Siting Factors

• Accessibility to roads
• Distance to primary roads
• Distance to secondary roads
• Distance to rural roads
• Accessibility to transmission lines
• Distance to 100K lines
• Distance to 250K lines
• Distance to above250K lines
• Wind power (or wind speed)
• Visibility
• Viewshed size
• of people in viewshed

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Siting Steps

• Factor generation
• Distance calculation
• Visibility calculation
• Factor standardization (0 100)
• Each factor is a map layer
• Factor weights determination by AHP
• Final score
• Weighted combination of factors
• Exclusion areas

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Factor Layers
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Wind Turbine visibility--Viewshed
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Wind Turbine Viewshed Size

• Red505km2
• Greed--805km2
• Blue--365km2
• Software tool developed to calculate viewshed
  size for each cell

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Visibility FactorViewshed Size

• Computational expensive
• About 700,000 cells
• Each cell requires 10 seconds
• About 76 days
• Parallel computing
• 12 computers
• Each computer runs two counties
• About 55000 cells
• 6 days
• Succeed with 3000 cells but failed with 55,000
  cells

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Visibility Factor-- of People in Viewshed
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Final Score Layer
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Candidate Sites
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Exclusion Zones
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Sites
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Software Tools for Wind Farm Siting
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Software Tools for Wind Farm Siting
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Thanks!

• Questions?

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Using AHP in GIS

• AHP is implemented as a software component
• AHP is integrated with ArcMap GIS(ESRI, Inc.) as
  an extension