An eco-friendly remote sensing assisted development procedure to install renewable energy infrastructure for highest techno-economic gain

Abstract

By taking socio-economic, terrain, and meteorological impacts into account, an eco-friendly methodology to sort the potential locations for installation of renewable energy infrastructure has been proposed, which is also able to address the most important challenge in the field, i.e., determination of the best contribution of the renewable energy sources. For this purpose, three advanced approaches, namely, remote sensing by geographic information system (GIS), optimization, and weighted decision-making are employed. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to evaluate the influence of land prices, nominal capacity, and relative importance of technical and economic indicators in decision-making. Iran is chosen as the case study because it has significant solar and wind energy potential and also has serious energy, economic, and environmental issues. The findings indicate an optimal land price of $200 per m2, a hub nominal capacity of 50 MW, and an equal weighting of objective functions for the case study. The average energy generation, levelized cost of energy (LCOE), PV ratio, and land utilization are projected to reach 288.5 GWh.year−1, 0.3260 $.(kWh)-1, 4.15 %, and 2362334 m2, respectively when the optimal procedure is applied. The sensitivity study also shows that relative to PV, the contribution of wind turbines increases with plant size.

Keywords

• Geographic information system
• Eco-friendly technology
• Renewable energy
• Techno-economic gain
• Clean energy production