Spatial planning for windenergy development using GIS : A study of Västernorrland County

Abstract: Countries across the globe have started taking measures to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions andto power the future with more sustainable forms of energy. One such initiative towards sustainableenergy generation is through wind energy. The wind energy contribution has shown a drastic increasein Sweden during the last few years. However there are several issues due to improper siting of windmills. This thesis aims to conduct a multi-criteria evaluation to determine suitable wind farm sites inVästernorrland County. The spatial planning through multi-criteria evaluation is done jointly usinganalytical hierarchy processing and weighted linear combination in ArcMap. There are 29 criteriataken into account and the buffer zones from each criterion are decided based on Swedish legislation,discussions with stakeholders and from similar previous studies. Three scenarios namely green,economy and tourism are created giving emphasize on the aspects as the title implies. The scenarioeconomy has the least area with very high suitability scores when compared to the other two scenarios.The results obtained for the three scenarios are grouped into classes with suitability scores. About 60%of the total area is unsuitable for wind farm installations and most of the area has less to moderaterange of suitability. The major constraints that restrict the wind mill installations are spaces with landcover like water, roads and national protected areas. Based on the suitability scores, the best three sitesare finally selected which covers the three scenario aspects. Other sites are excluded due to reasons likelow suitability, closeness to the county boundary and too small in size. Among the best three sites, twosites already have permission to build wind farms. The proposed third site is about 2.5 squarekilometres located to the south-east of the county. In conclusion, the project result not only shows thatthere are more potential