Incorporating visibility information into multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) for wind turbine deployment

Wind turbines with taller hubs and longer blades are more feasible and cost-effective than their predecessors since they reduce the unit cost of energy production. However, the larger size of these structures makes them more visible and dominant features in the landscape. Higher visibility of wind turbines generally raises economic and environmental concerns in communities. The increasing size of wind turbines, therefore, poses a dilemma between lower costs of wind energy and higher visibility impacts. Most MCDM applications highlight the importance of wind turbine visibility and conceptualize this factor as the distance from settlements, coastal areas, etc. They assume that the higher distance from a potential turbine site lowers the impact of visibility or vice versa. This assumption helps introduce visibility impacts into the MCDM to some degree. However, calculating visibility can provide more reliable and realistic geospatial information to be used as a decision variable. This paper conceptualizes turbine visibility as quantitative visibility scores derived from multiple viewshed calculations. Geospatial information on visibility, capacity factor, land cover, topographic ruggedness, slope, and eight other distance criteria (e.g., distance from settlements) were processed in a GIS environment. Fuzzy standardization and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were used to standardize the maps and calculate criteria weights. A suitability map was produced by combining the weighted maps. Policy recommendations were made for wind power deployment.