TITLE:
Locating of Wind Power Farms by Analytic Hierarchy Process Method (Case Study: Sistan and Baluchistan Province, Iran)
AUTHORS:
Mehdi Asadi, Mokhtar Karami
KEYWORDS:
Wind Power, Energy, AHP, Sistan and Baluchistan
JOURNAL NAME:
Computational Water, Energy, and Environmental Engineering,
Vol.6 No.1,
December
28,
2016
ABSTRACT: Limitation of fossil energy reserves in the world and increasing level of energy consumption, have always challenged human to replace new energy sources. Meanwhile, wind power as one of the new aspects of energy is of a special place. Due to the topography of the Sistan and Baluchistan province and its relative position, it is one of the best places to build wind farms. The aim of this study was to determine suitable locations for the construction of wind farms in the province. The following criteria were considered for various standards and due to the importance of data integration, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method was selected and implemented to weight the layer through Expert choice software. ArcGIS was used for layers spatial analysis and overlapping. After data analysis, the studied region, in terms of the susceptibility to build wind farms, was divided into four levels: excellent, good, fair, weak. Results indicated that GIS as a supportive and decision making system is helpful preparing data and modeling priorities and experts comments regarding various factors and help designers selecting a suitable place to build wind farms. In this study, we determined three priorities for the construction of wind farms, taking into account the limited overlap and conformity of limitations map and locating, the area of prioritized region, climate and the field observations; the priority order is excellent, good, average, including Zabol, central regions in Zabol and Chabahar.