Solar Site Suitability (AHP)
Plugin ID: 5402
Multi-criteria (AHP) site suitability analysis for utility-scale solar PV farms, from DEM, manual GHI or ERA5 SSRD, and land cover. Region-agnostic.
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Solar Site Suitability (AHP) identifies suitable areas for utility-scale photovoltaic solar farms using a spatial Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP, Saaty 1980). Starting from a DEM, a land-cover raster, and either a manual GHI raster or ERA5 SSRD downloaded from Copernicus, it derives slope and aspect, reclassifies each criterion to a 1-5 suitability scale, combines them with AHP weights (validated by the Consistency Ratio CR < 0.10), applies boolean exclusion masks (steep slope, pole-facing aspect, protected/urban/water land cover) and extracts contiguous viable polygons above a minimum area. The tool is region-agnostic: thresholds, break values, land-cover classes, AHP weights, minimum area and the favourable orientation (hemisphere selector) are all user-defined, so it works anywhere in the world, not only in Colombia. Dependencies: standard QGIS 3.28+ plus optional cdsapi in the QGIS Python environment for the ERA5 download workflow. Outputs: suitability rasters, viable-sites GeoPackage, ERA5 request/NetCDF/GeoTIFF/CSV products, and HTML/CSV reports.
