17.32. Planning a solar farm
Module contributed by Paolo Cavallini - Faunalia
Note
This chapter shows how to use several criteria to locate the areas suitable for installing a photovoltaic power station
First of all, create an aspect map from DTM:
[Data type: int; cell size:100]
In GRASS, aspect is calculated in degrees, counterclockwise starting from East. To extract only South facing slopes (270 degrees +- 45), we can reclassify it:
with the following rules:
225 thru 315 = 1 south
* = NULL
You can use the text file reclass_south.txt
provided. Note that with these simple text files we can create also very complex reclassifications.
We want to build a large farm, so we select only large (> 100 ha) contiguous areas:
Finally, we convert to a vector:
[Feature type: area; Smooth corners: yes]
Exercise for the reader: repeat the analysis, replacing GRASS commands with analogous from other programs.