Site Suitability Analysis of Solar Farm using AHP Technique

Abstract

This paper incorporates Geoinformatics techniques to determine site suitability analysis for establishment of
solar farms based on photovoltaic (PV) solar cell technology in the district of Pune, state of Maharashtra, India. By
analyzing the data on various factors affecting the PV solar farm site suitability, one can map these factors according to
different weightage linked to each factor and using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) techniques. Remote sensing (RS)
based satellite data processing of LANDSAT 8 datasets were used to derive Land Use Land Cover (LULC) map. Later,
along with Cartosat-1 Digital Elevation Model (CartoDEM) which is a National DEM developed by the Indian Space
Research Organization (ISRO) was used to model the slope and aspect map for the study area. Also, Global Horizontal
Irradiation (GHI) data from GLOBAL SOLAR ATLAS was utilized to derive solar irradiation map along with,
boundaries and others vector datasets from NREL and DIVA-GIS.
Paper aims to produce an site suitability map which indicates the highly suitable and productive area to establish a solar
farm.
Result shows that Pune district can be considered as very good location to establish solar farm for photovoltaic based
systems, the extremely suitable area to establish solar farm represent 27% (4217 km2
) and 44% (6815 km2
) is strongly
suitable area from total area of 15,642 km².