Abstract
Wind power is widely considered to be a qualified renewable, clean, ecological and inexhaustible resource that is becoming a leader in the current energy transition process. It is a mature technology solution that was quickly developed and has been massively integrated into power systems in recent years. Indeed, a remarkable number of renewable integration policies have been promoted by different governments and countries. With the aim of maximizing the power given by wind resources, the locations of both onshore and offshore wind power plants must be optimized following a sort of different criteria. Under this scenario, a number of factors and decision criteria in the evaluation and selection of locations can be identified. Moreover, the relevant wind power increasing in the power generation mix is addressed, along with a standardization of factors and decision criteria in the optimization and selection of such optimal locations. In this context, this paper describes a systematic review and meta-analysis combining most of the contributions and studies proposed during the last decade. Thus, our aim is focused on reviewing and categorizing all factors to be considered for optimal location estimation, pointing out the differences among the selected factors and the decision criteria for onshore and offshore wind power plants. In addition, our review also includes an analysis of the representative key indicators for the contributions, such as the annual frequency of publications, geographical classification, analysis by category, evaluation method and determining factors.
Highlights
The depletion of fossil fuels, combined with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, leads to a single result: energy transition [1,2]
Once the objective of eligibility was applied, we reviewed the full text of each work, discarding revisions by the information given by the abstracts
The efficient use of renewable energy sources is extremely relevant in the global energy transition, with wind energy being the most mature technology within renewable energy sources
Summary
The depletion of fossil fuels, combined with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, leads to a single result: energy transition [1,2]. Renewable energies, both inexhaustible and clean sources, constitute the main support for a sustainable energy transition [3]. There was the largest increase in global capacity, reaching 2180 GW of total capacity, of which 53% belonged to hydraulic energy and 24% to wind energy (onshore + offshore) [4]. During 2017, 13 European and American countries reached 10% or more of their electricity consumption with wind energy, and according to the IEA Wind sources, the global generated energy amounted to 1430 T Wh. Offshore wind energy reached its best year ever, with an increase of 67% compared to 2016
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