Site selection for new PV power plants based on their observability

Abstract

a b s t r a c tDespite the advantages that power plants based on renewable energies offer, there are some restrictions to the social acceptance of these facilities. One of these restrictions is the visual impact that large power plants may generate on people. This paper presents a new methodology for ranking the feasible places in a zone for the construction of new photovoltaic (PV) power plants according to their visibility. The methodology is based on the fuzzy viewshed and the distance decay methods, which enable to calculate the maximum number of hours in a mean day in which the new PV plant may be viewed by each possible observer. This number is related to the inhabitants in the zone, the size of the plant, the possible observers from paths and roads, and their distance to the PV plant. The proposed methodology is implemented in a Geographical Information System which allows the presentation of visual results that help to identify the best areas in the zone under study. This methodology can be useful to local authorities who have to authorize the installation of the new power plant, or investors who are trying to find the best locations from the point of view of visual impact.

Quantitative Evaluation of BIPV Visual Impact in Building Retrofits Using Saliency Models

“…A preliminary concept looks like this: one first needs to identify which perspectives are more prominent among an infinite number of others. Such screening tools have already been developed and widely used in terrain analysis [27,28,55,56]. From each of these prominent perspectives, an S value is calculated, which also has a weight attached to it that depends on the prominence of the corresponding perspective.…”

Design Methods of Underwater Grounding Electrode Array by Considering Inter-Electrode Interference for Floating PVs

“…When the grounding electrodes are installed, each installation point is called p 1 , p 2 , · · · , p n , and points p 1 (x 1 , y 1 ), p 2 (x 2 , y 2 ), · · · , p n (x n , y n ) are assigned to each installation point based on an arbitrary point (p 1 ). The rise in the potential of the k-th electrode is the sum of the potential rise of the k-th electrode and the potential rise of other electrodes, as shown in Equation (6).…”

“…Solar energy accounts for a large proportion of the new and renewable energy sources [4,5]. Currently, large-scale photovoltaic (PV) plants are continuously being installed [6][7][8][9][10]. In addition, policies such as the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) in the United States of America [11][12][13], Renewable Obligations (RO) in the United Kingdom [14,15] and Renewable Purchase Obligation (RPO) in India [16,17] encourage the expansion of PV generation [18][19][20].…”

Effects of renewable energy on landscape in Europe: Comparison of hydro, wind, solar, bio-, geothermal and infrastructure energy landscapes

“…The landscape impacts of solar power facilities depend significantly on the size of the installations as well as on their concentration in a certain area. Numerous authors analysed landscape impacts of large scale on-ground PV: their land use effects (Chiabrando, R. et al 2009;Minelli, A. et al 2014;Fernandez-Jimenez, L.A. et al 2015); landscape and habitat fragmentation (Hernandez, R.R. et al 2014); impacts on ecosystems (Hernandez, R.R.…”