GIS-BASED SOLAR AND WIND TURBINE SITE SELECTION USING MULTI-CRITERIA ANALYSIS: CASE STUDY TEHRAN, IRAN

Renewable energy has less negative impacts on environment than fossil fuels. Iran has many resources for renewable energy exploitation but because of their high price, it has not been developed. Site selection is an important step for utilizing large investments like solar farms and wind turbines. Multi-criteria evaluation methods are commonly used for site selection. The purpose of this paper is to determine suitable sites for solar farm and wind turbine using GIS and AHP in Tehran, in order to generate a distributed network to increase power network stability. The final land suitability index was grouped in four categories as "most suitable", "suitable", "moderate" and "low suitable". As a result 94.61% (789939.63 km(2)) is low suitable, 4.47% (37337.17 km(2)) is moderate, 0.59% (4964.22 km(2)) is suitable and 0.32% (2680.70 km(2)) is the most suitable for building wind turbine and for solar farm, 44.07% (8116.88 km(2)) is low suitable, 12.81% (2359.79 km(2)) is moderate, 35.10% (6464.29 km(2)) is suitable and 8.02% (1477.28 km(2)) is the most suitable.