Abstract
Being cleaner and climate friendly, wind energy has been increasingly utilized to meet the ever-growing global energy demands. In the State of Nebraska, USA, a wide gap exists between wind resource and actual energy production, and it is imperative to expand the wind energy development. Because of the formidable costs associated with wind energy development, the locations for new wind turbines need to be carefully selected to provide the greatest benefit for a given investment. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been widely used to identify the suitable wind farm locations. In this study, a GIS-based multi-criteria approach was developed to identify the areas that are best suited to wind energy development in Northeast Nebraska, USA. Seven criteria were adopted in this method, including distance to roads, closeness to transmission lines, population density, wind potential, land use, distance to cities, slope and exclusionary areas. The suitability of wind farm development was modeled by a weighted overlay of geospatial layers corresponding to these criteria. The results indicate that the model is capable of identifying locations highly suited for wind farm development. The approach could help identify suitable wind farm locations in other areas with a similar geographic background.
Highlights
Renewable energy production has gained popularity worldwide due to the rapid depletion of fossil fuels and a global effort to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate climate change [1]
The gap between wind resource availability and actual production clearly demonstrates the potential of further wind energy development in the State of Nebraska, U.S Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been widely used as a cost-effective spatial decision support tool to select the best locations to place wind farms
A suite of physical and socio-economic factors were selected as criteria to analyze the suitable locations for wind farm development, including wind potential, land use, population density and distance to major roads, slope and transmission lines
Summary
Renewable energy production has gained popularity worldwide due to the rapid depletion of fossil fuels and a global effort to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate climate change [1]. As an important type of renewable energy, wind energy is growing rapidly in use across the world [2]. It is estimated that approximately 10 million megawatts (MW) of wind energy is available to use on the earth at all times [2]. The U.S state of Nebraska has great potential for the production of wind energy, ranking fourth among the 50 U.S states in wind energy resources. It only ranked 24th regarding the actual wind energy production [5]. As of 30 September 2013, Nebraska has 260 wind turbines with a production capacity of approximately 460 MW, which is much lower than its potential capacity of
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