Analysis of Land Suitability to Locate Wind Power Plant in Ardabil Province Using AHP and SAW Methods in GIS Environment

Finding the best site for construction of wind farm such as any other engineering project needs basic information and specific programming. After confirmation of exploitable wind potential, finding the suitable location of wind farm regarding to various technical, economic-social and natural factors are so important. This study analyzes land suitability for placing wind farm in Ardabil province regarding to some effective factors such as height, slope, and distance from urban areas, distance from village regions, distance from water bodies and distance from main roads networks. For this purpose, at first 9 effective factors are identified and prepared in GIS and weight of each criterion and classes are calculated by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) methods. The next step of procedure was the elimination of exclusionary areas for wind power plant. Afterwards, the study area was zoned for each criterion using analytical functions of GIS. Finally by integrating zoned maps based on weight from AHP and SAW methods, final map of both methods are supplied in 5 classes from completely suitable to unsuitable. In this study comparing the results of 2 methods expressive that AHP method results are more cautious than SAW results. Also Completely suitable class resulted from 2 methods in spite of different area, shows Ardabil Plain and foothills of Sabalan could be considered as suitable site to exploit of wind energy.