Visibility Assessment of New Photovoltaic Power Plants in Areas with Special Landscape Value

Abstract

Power plants based on renewable sources offer environmental, technical and economic advantages. Of particular importance is the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional power plants. Despite the advantages, people are often opposed to the construction of these facilities due to their high visual impact, particularly if they are close to places with a great cultural and/or landscape value. This paper proposes a new methodology for identifying the most suitable geographical areas for the construction of new photovoltaic (PV) power plants in zones of special scenic or cultural interest, helping to keep the environment free from the visual intrusions caused by these facilities. From several repeated analyses, the degree of visibility of the new PV plant, the potential observation time of passing visitors, considering the route they follow and their speed, and the increase in visibility of the plants when seen totally or partially with the sky as background, are determined. The result obtained is a map showing the ranking of the geographical areas based on a variable calculated in such analyses: the Global Accumulated Perception Time (GAPT). The application of this methodology can help the different agents involved in the decision-making process for the installation of new PV plant by providing them with an objective visibility criterion.

Suitability Analysis Using GIS-Based Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for Solar Power Exploration

“…Pinpointing optimal sites for solar farms involves diverse methodologies, such as MCDA (a technique for order of preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS), ordered weight averaging (OWA), and fuzzy AHP) [11], solar resource assessment [73], viewshed analysis [74], solar pathfinder analysis [75], Boolean-fuzzy logic model [61], the Dempster-Shafer method [76], and many more. Integrating machine learning and AI algorithms [77] also proves advantageous for renewable energy planning and microgrid development.…”

Genetic Algorithms-Based Optimum PV Site Selection Minimizing Visual Disturbance

“…These include, for example, the cumulative viewshed analysis (e.g., [27]), where the visibility of an object is quantified based on multiple, different viewpoint locations (observers), as well as the fuzzy viewshed analysis (e.g., [25,[28][29][30]), which determines the likelihood of an object to be seen, while accounting for the distance-decay effect in visibility. The latter effect can be also considered by performing a "weighted" viewshed analysis, where weighting factors are assigned to different visibility distances based on various distance-decay functions (e.g., [31,32]).…”

“…Even though viewshed analysis models have been criticized in terms of their accuracy (e.g., [33,34]), they remain a very popular tool in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for territorial planning and landscape analysis. Accordingly, there are numerous studies of viewshed analysis for various landscape components (e.g., [26,31,35,36]), whereas, up to now, only a few focus on PV site selection [32,37]. Specifically, in [37], ranking of feasible areas for new PV installations according to their visibility was realized by conducting a fuzzy viewshed analysis, which enables the calculation of the maximum number of hours in a mean day in which the PV plant may be viewed by each potential observer.…”

“…The proposed methodology was applied for two different Spanish municipalities. Zorzano-Alba et al [32] developed a GIS-based methodology to identify areas for new PV plants in regions with special landscape or cultural protection that will have low or high visibility for a set of moving observers, with an application to the La Rioja region in Northern Spain. Visibility was quantified by calculating the "Global Accumulated Perception Time" variable, which was defined as the cumulative total hours in a year in which the proposed PV installation can be seen by observers moving along roads/paths in the area under investigation.…”

Special Issue “GIS Applications in Green Development”

“…The study highlights GIS's prowess in identifying suitable territories for renewable energy development, assessing technical potential and facilitating the integration of renewable energy technologies in Ukraine's energy sector. Zorzano-Alba et al [2] addressed the sensitive issue of the visual impact associated with renewable energy infrastructure, introducing a novel methodology for identifying optimal locations for photovoltaic power plants, especially in areas of cultural or scenic significance. Maniatis et al [3] focused on fire risk mapping in the context of climate change.…”