Environmental Planning for Wind Power Plant Site Selection using a Fuzzy PROMETHEE-Based Outranking Method in Geographical Information System

Abstract

Selection of suitable sites for wind power plants is one of the most important decision on wind resources development. Site selection for the establishment of large wind power plants requires spatial evaluation taking technical, economic, and environmental considerations into account. This study has applied a combination of PROMETHEE and Fuzzy AHP methods in a geographical information system environment to carry out spatial site selection for wind power plants in Lorestan Province of Iran. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method is used to determine the weights of the criteria whereas the PROMETHEE method is used to prioritise the alternatives based on the weights obtained from the fuzzy AHP. The integration of GIS and MCDM makes a powerful tool for the selection of the best suitable sites because GIS provides efficient manipulation, analysis and presentation of spatial data while MCDM supplies consistent weight of alternatives and criteria.The results showed that about 7.38 % of the area of Lorestan province is most suitable for wind power plants development. Sensitivity analysis shows that suitable zones coincide with suitable divisions of the input layers. The sensitivity analysis showed satisfactory results for the combination of PROMETHEE and Fuzzy AHP methods in wind power plant site selection.