A GIS-AHP combination for the sites assessment of large-scale CSP plants with dry and wet cooling systems. Case study: Eastern Morocco

Abstract

In this paper, we assessed the suitability of the Eastern region of Morocco to host large-scale Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants by combining Geographic Information System (GIS) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). For this reason, a high spatial resolution GIS database is built using layers provided from different governmental organizations. Additionally, since the potential of the Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI) is the most important criterion for CSP site selection; a high-quality satellite solar map with a spatial resolution of 1 km2/pixel and twenty years of time coverage was used.Since CSP power plants need cooling systems for their power block cycle; the suitability of two cooling techniques (dry and wet) were evaluated for this region.Results show that Eastern Morocco can be considered as a very good location for hosting CSP power plants. For the wet cooling systems, the highly suitable sites to host CSP plants represent 11.7% from the total area, while 5.5% is the proportion of the highly suitable sites for CSP plants with dry cooling systems.