Workflow Narrative

Solar Site Suitability Analysis

Problem It Solves

Where are top solar candidates based on terrain suitability, and which shortlisted sites are strong enough for deeper engineering review?

Who It Is For

Solar development teams and regional screening analysts.

Primary User

Solar developers, renewable consultants, and utility planning units.

What It Does

Computes solar siting suitability and visual-impact proxies from terrain.
Selects and ranks candidate point sites.
Emits attributed candidate vectors for downstream review.

How It Works

Computes terrain suitability response from slope/aspect and neighborhood context.
Estimates visual-impact proxy from terrain prominence and local exposure contrasts.
Applies thresholding and ranking to emit top candidate points with attributes.
Indicative formula: suitability ~= f(slope, aspect, relief); candidates = arg top-k(suitability) above threshold.

Why It Wins

Emits ranked candidate vectors with visual-impact attributes, enabling immediate GIS review and filtering.

Typical Buying Trigger

Early project screening demands a short list of high-probability solar candidates across a large area.

Typical Presets

higher candidate_threshold for only top candidates.
lower threshold plus larger max_candidate_sites for exploratory workflows.

Inputs

Parameter	Optional	Description
dem	no	Digital elevation model used as the terrain reference surface.
candidate_threshold	no	Minimum suitability threshold required for candidate-site extraction.
max_candidate_sites	no	Upper limit on the number of candidate sites emitted in vector output.

Outputs

Parameter	Type	Description
suitability_score	GeoTIFF	Core suitability score raster produced by the model.
visual_impact	GeoTIFF	Visual-impact raster used to screen candidate sites and stakeholder constraints.
candidate_sites	GeoPackage	Vector candidate-site features passing selection thresholds.
summary	JSON	Machine-readable summary report containing run metadata, QA diagnostics, and key metrics.
html_report	HTML	Human-readable customer-facing report generated from the summary contract for stakeholder review and QA traceability.

When sweep_spec is supplied, the workflow also emits run_matrix_summary, sensitivity_report, sensitivity_report_html, and stability_map. The sensitivity report includes metrics.primary_metric, metrics.primary_relative_span, and metrics.stability_class (high, medium, low), while stability_map uses classes 3=high, 2=medium, 1=low.

Python Example

import whitebox_workflows as wbw

wbe = wbw.WbEnvironment(include_pro=True, tier="pro")

suit, vis, sites, summary = wbe.solar_site_suitability_analysis(
    dem="data/dem.tif",
    candidate_threshold=0.7,
    max_candidate_sites=200,
    output_prefix="output/solar_siting",
)

print(suit)
print(vis)
print(sites)
print(summary)

License Notice

Use of this function requires a license for Whitebox Workflows Professional (WbW-Pro). Please visit www.whiteboxgeo.com to purchase a license.

Project Links

WbW Homepage User Manual Learn More