CSP Sites Suitability Analysis in the Eastern Region of ... · 2010) data for global horizontal and direct normal irradiance for the whole Mediterranean region [22]. The international

Energy Procedia 49 ( 2014 ) 2270 – 2279

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

1876-6102 © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).Selection and peer review by the scientifi c conference committee of SolarPACES 2013 under responsibility of PSE AG. Final manuscript published as received without editorial corrections. doi: 10.1016/j.egypro.2014.03.240

SolarPACES 2013

CSP sites suitability analysis in the Eastern region of Morocco A. Alami Merrounia* , Ab. Mezrhabb, A. Mezrhaba

aLaboratory of mechanics and energy Faculty of Sciences, Mohamed 1st university 60000, Oujda Morocco bTechnologies and Geographical Information Space Management’s Team, GIS and Remote SensingCentre University Mohammed

First, Oujda 60000, Morocco

Abstract

Morocco in general and its eastern region in particular has become one of the target regions for investors in the field of solar energy, since it hosts the Ain Beni Mathar solar thermal power plant and it will host one of the five future CSP power plants fixed by MASEN (the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy). Consequently, it is necessary to identify the most appropriate sites for the installation of the CSP power plants in this region with high precision to profit as much as possible from the solar resource. This paper presents some preliminary results aiming to highlight the suitable areas for the installation of CSP power plants in the eastern region of Morocco using ArcGIS software and a large land exclusion database with “high spatial resolution”. This database has been built based on data sets from governmental organizations and our knowledge about the details of the region. The solar map has been calculated using the hemispherical viewshed algorithm included in the ArcGIS environment. For each layer all spatial information on the defined exclusion criteria was overlaid and marks the non suitable places as white pixels. In a final step, all layers are overlaid and a final map was created showing the suitable and non suitable places. The results show that the eastern region of Morocco has a high suitability to host CSP power plants with more than 65% of its total surface fulfilling the criteria. ©2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer review by the scientific conference committee of SolarPACES 2013 under responsibility of PSE AG.

Keywords: Concentrated solar power; Geographic information systems; Site suitability analysis; Eastern region of Morocco.

* Corresponding author. Tel:+212668578868; Fax: +212536500601. E-mail address: [email protected]

© 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).Selection and peer review by the scientific conference committee of SolarPACES 2013 under responsibility of PSE AG. Final manuscript published as received without editorial corrections.

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.egypro.2014.03.240&domain=pdf

A. Alami Merrouni et al. / Energy Procedia 49 ( 2014 ) 2270 – 2279 2271

1. Introduction

During the last decade, the price of the oil barrel has significantly increased and recorded unprecedented prices. The impacts were more significant on countries with low energy production. Since Morocco is one of the most deficient countries in fossil energies, with an energetic dependency that has reached about 96% in 2011 [1] (see Fig.1), its energetic bill has increased, mainly because of the augmentation of the amount of consumption in parallel with the rapid economic development.

Against such a problematic situation and in view of Morocco’s enormous potential of renewable energies, the Moroccan state has chosen to largely benefit from these resources in order to develop electricity generation from renewable energies with the objective to reach 42% by the year 2020 [2].

Fig.1.Rate of energy dependency in Morocco (%).

In the field of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), an ambitious project was launched aiming to produce 2000 megawatts from solar energy [3]. For this reason, five sites were identified to host solar power plants.

The eastern region of Morocco will host one of these sites. The purpose of this study is to highlight the suitable areas for the implementation of CSP power plants in this region by developing an exclusion map using ArcGIS software, available solar resource, high resolution geographical information on land use, the existing infrastructure, hydrology, protected areas etc.

2. The eastern region of Morocco

The eastern region of Morocco has been recently forming a center of interest for the Moroccan state. This interest emerges from different reasons and is mainly based on the large economical potential the region suggests, mainly regarding renewable energies related fields. Actually, the eastern region - which occupies 11.6% of the Moroccan territory (82 820 km²) - is placed at a strategic location, having the Algerian borders to the west and the Mediterranean Sea in the North. Moreover, this region is the only one in Morocco which has the particularity of gathering both the Mediterranean and the Saharian climates at the same time.

909192939495969798

2.004 2.005 2.006 2.007 2.008 2.009 2.010 2.011

ener

getic

dep

ende

ncy

%

2272 A. Alami Merrouni et al. / Energy Procedia 49 ( 2014 ) 2270 – 2279

Fig. 2.Eastern region of Morocco.

3. GIS and renewable energies

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a very powerful tool for the analysis, consultation and compilation of maps and geographic data. In the field of renewable energy, GIS represents a very convenient digital environment to identify sites with high energy potential and it can provide analyzes and results that help policymakers to make decisions for the installation and integration for instance of a new CSP power plant for electricity production [19] or electricity and water desalination[20].

In the literature several studies have used GIS-based assessments to evaluate renewable energy sources either for a large or regional scale.

Gormally et al evaluated the annual renewable electricity potential from diverse sources (wind, solar, bioenergy, hydro-power) for Cambria UK [15]. Similarly, Janke [10] used GIS to identify the optimal places for the installation of wind and solar power plants in Colorado. Aydin has successfully identified the best locations for the installation of hybrid system combining solar-PV and wind in western Turkey [11].

In order to identify the favorable areas for the implementation of wind farms in New York State, Van Haaren used a new method by including economical and environmental impact to the spatial multi criteria analyses [7]. Indeed, the development of the solar market leads to many researches which highlight the suitable places for the installation of solar technologies either on regional scale for CSP [12] and PV [13] or on a large scale as in the case of the PV assessment for the country of Oman [4]. GIS has also been used for rural electrification assessment with renewable sources of energy [5, 9, 16, 17] or to create dust risk map for solar energy systems [8].

In very large scale, web-GIS tools are freely available. PV-GIS [24] is a GIS application that is available in real time on Internet which allows the calculation of the photovoltaic solar energy potential in Europe and Africa.

Solar-Med-Atlas is a portal that provides high resolution (1km × 1km) and long term coverage (20 years 1991-2010) data for global horizontal and direct normal irradiance for the whole Mediterranean region [22].

The international renewable energy agency (IRENA) launched an ambitious project to build an accurate, reliable and consistent internet-based GIS for solar and wind energy over the entire globe [21].

In the current study, a large database of land exclusion with high precision has been used to highlight the suitable areas for the installation of future CSP power plants in the eastern region of Morocco.


4. Exclusion database

Identifying future sites to host CSP power plants in a region or a country is an essential task in the early stage in the field of potential assessment. Such an investigation requests a spatial analysis taking into consideration the available solar potential and geographical information such as land use, elevation, vegetation, hydrology etc.

Based on data sets from governmental organizations, our knowledge about the details of the field of study and the ArcGIS environment, a large land exclusion database with “high spatial resolution” has been built.

The solar map is calculated using the ArcGIS solar radiation model that has been deployed in previous studies [6,12]. The modeling method of the solar map as well as the construction elements of the database of exclusion will be detailed in the next paragraphs.

4.1. Solar map

The solar radiation tools, in the ArcGIS Spatial analyst toolbox, use the hemispherical viewshed algorithm developed by HEMI [25] to calculate the insolation through a landscape or for specific locations based on digital terrain model. Solar radiation that comes from the sun undergoes changes, first through the atmosphere and then by the topography. It reaches the earth surface as being direct, diffuse and reflected. The sum of these three components forms the global solar radiation. In its analysis, solar radiation tools don’t take into consideration the amount of reflected solar radiation. It represents the global solar radiation as the sum of only the direct and the diffuse solar radiation [23]. Solar radiation analysis tools calculate the solar maps following these steps [23]:

The calculation of an upward-looking hemispherical viewshed based on topography. Overlay of the viewshed on a direct sun map to estimate direct radiation. Overlay of the viewshed on a diffuse sky map to estimate diffuse radiation. Repeating the process for every location of interest to produce an insolation map.

Fig. 3.(a) Digital elevation model; (b) Annual direct solar radiation map.

a b


In this study, we used the NASA Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) 90m × 90m digital elevation model (DEM) of the eastern region of Morocco to model the direct solar radiation map. The solar map and the DEM are presented in fig.3.

4.2. Database of land exclusion

In addition to the amount of solar radiation, the installation of the CSP power plants requires further analysis on land capability and suitability. For this reason we have developed a large database with high spatial resolution to exclude the areas that have impediments for the installation of CSP facilities. As an example of the high precision that our database provides, the fig.5 illustrates the exact location of the transmission lines, starting from the substation of the north of Oujda.

In this work, and to reduce the number of layers, we divided our database on four large layers (see Fig.6): Infrastructure Hydrology Vegetation Terrain

The fig.4 presents the sub-layers of the database of land exclusion.

Fig.4. Sub-layers of the database of land exclusion.


Fig.5.The transmission lines at the substation of the north of Oujda (the blue, red and green colors refer respectively to 22, 60 and 225 kV transmission lines).

5. Suitable areas for CSP power plants installation

The assessment of the potential site to host CSP power plants in general and parabolic trough power plants in particular need some special criteria on the amount of solar radiation, the land slope and the available water resource that is used for cleaning and cooling cycles, etc.

The goal of this study is to apply exclusion criteria to the different layers of the data sets and overlaying them to obtain a mask of exclusion showing suitable and non suitable sites for the installation of CSP power plants. Until now, there is no common method for the selection of exclusion criteria, but most of the studies agree to exclude the watercourses , the road network , the railways , forests and protected areas [26] [14].

In previous works, some researchers [18, 27] chose a maximum slope gradient of 1% whereas [12] used 4% and DLR used 2,1% [26]. A minimum annual solar radiation of 1500 KWh/m² is the value selected by [27] while [12] used 2000 Kwh/m².

In our analysis, we excluded all vegetation, watersheds, roads network, the power grid and the delimitations of the cities. Regarding the solar radiation, we used a minimal value of 1750KWh/m² (as an approximate mean average of the values chosen by [27, 12]) and a maximal slope gradient of 2%. This last is calculated from the NASA Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) 90m × 90m digital elevation model. All the exclusion criteria are summed up on the table.1 and the final exclusion map is presented on fig.7a in which the white pixels identify the excluded areas, in other words, the inappropriate sites for CSP power plants installation.

Table 1.Exclusion criteria.

Element of the database Criteria of exclusion

Annual direct solar radiation Exclude <1750 Kwh/m²

Roads Exclude with a buffer of 500 m

Railways

Power grid

Cities

Vegetation

Dams

Waterways (permanent & not permanent)

Slopes

Exclude with a buffer of 500 m

Exclude

Exclude

Exclude

Exclude

Exclude with a buffer of 500 m

Exclude > 2 %


Fig. 6. The elements of the land exclusion database; (a) slopes; (b) infrastructure; (c) hydrology (d) vegetation.

a b

c d


6. Validation of the results

In order to validate our database and exclusion criteria, we should check if our GIS analysis can give reasonable results with respect to the existing power plants in the eastern region of Morocco.

The Ain Beni Mathar solar thermal power plant located in our region is one of the most promising solar power projects in Africa. The project consists of a 470 MWe hybrid power plant composed of a combined cycle and a 20 MWe solar thermal system.

In this study, it has been demonstrated that after the exclusion of the unfavorable areas for the installation of the CSP power plants (based on the criteria of table.1) the location of the Ain Beni Mathar power plant responds to the requirements of our exclusion criteria, see fig.7b.

Fig. 7. (a) The final exclusion map shows the suitable sites for the installation of CSP power plants in the eastern region of Morocco (the white pixels are the unsuitable areas); (b) the location of AinBeniMathar power plant (used in order to validate our model).

a b


7. Conclusion

This paper presents a study that has been conducted in order to identify the suitable areas for the installation of concentrating solar power plants in the eastern region of Morocco. We used a standard GIS software and high spatial resolution database of land exclusion, based on data sets from governmental organizations and our knowledge on the field of study. The solar map was calculated using the solar radiation tools within the ArcGIS Spatial analyst toolbox.

Results show that the eastern region of Morocco has a high suitability to host CSP power plants with more than 65% of its total surface fulfilling the criteria which presents an area of 38 957 Km² from a planimetric surface of 59 514 Km².

The results of this study can help policymakers, investors and actors in the field of solar energy to have a clear idea of the most appropriate sites to build CSP power plants and to benefit as much as possible from solar energy.

In the future, and as an extension to this study, we are going to make a ranking analysis to identify the most suitable sites for the installation of CSP power plants in the eastern region of Morocco by including groundwater data, dust concentration in the atmosphere (from satellite images) and results from a study on the moving sand in the region.

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to acknowledge « La Direction Régionale des Eaux et Forets de l'Oriental », « L’agence du bassin hydraulique de la moulouya », « L’Office National de l’Electricité et de l’Eau Potable », for providing us with data of land exclusion. We would like also to warmly gratitude Fabian Wolfertstetter for sharing his knowledge in the field of CSP.

References

[1] Ministry of Energy, Mines, Water and Environment, Energy Indicator Analysis, April 2013, available online at: http://www.mem.gov.ma/publucations/Analysedesindicateursenergetiques12Avril2013.pdf .

[2] Benkhadra A. Does Morocco provide a new model for bridging old and new energy systems? Morocco’s Annual Investment Conference. London, 9 November, 2009. </http://www.mem.gov.ma/Actualites/2009/Novembre/Pdf/London_speech.pdf>.

[3] Presentation of Moroccan solar plan, available online at: <http://www.masen.org.ma/index.php?Id=42&lang=en#/_>. [4] Charabi Y, Gastli A. PV site suitability analysis using GIS-based spatial fuzzy multi-criteria evaluation. Renewable Energy 2011; 36: 2554-

2561. [5] Van Hoesen J, Letendre S. Evaluating potential renewable energy resources in Poultney, Vermont:A GIS-based approach to supporting rural

community energy planning. Renewable Energy 2010; 35: 2114–2122. [6] Gastli A, Charabi Y. Solar electricity prospects in Oman using GIS-based solar radiation maps. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

2010;14: 790–797. [7] van Haaren R, Fthenakis V.GIS-based wind farm site selection using spatial multi-criteria analysis (SMCA): Evaluating the case for New

York State. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 2011; 15: 3332– 3340. [8] Charabi Y, Gastli A. Spatio-temporal assessment of dust risk maps for solar energy systems using proxy data. Renewable Energy 2012;

44: 23-31. [9] Sliz-Szkliniarz B, Vogt J . GIS-based approach for the evaluation of wind energy potential: A case study for the Kujawsko–

PomorskieVoivodeship . Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 2011; 15:1696–1707. [10] Janke J.R. Multicriteria GIS modeling of wind and solar farms in Colorado. Renewable Energy 2010; 35: 2228-2234. [11] Aydin N.Y, et al. GIS-based site selection methodology for hybrid renewable energy systems: A case study from western Turkey. Energy

Conversion and Management 2013; 70: 90–106. [12] Clifton J, BoruffB.J .Assessing the potential for concentrated solar power development in rural Australia. Energy Policy 2010; 38: 5272–

5280. [13] Sun Y. w, et al. GIS-based approach for potential analysis of solar PV generation at the regional scale: A case study of Fujian Province.

Energy Policy 2013; 58:248–259. [14] Sánchez-Lozano J.M, et al. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods for the

evaluation of solar farms locations: Case study in south-eastern Spain. RenewableandSustainableEnergyReviews 2013; 24: 544–556. [15] GormallyA.M , et al . A regional-scale assessment of local renewable energy resources in Cumbria, UK. Energy Policy 2012; 50: 283–293.


[16] Tiba C., et al. A GIS-based decision support tool for renewable energy management and planning in semi-arid rural environments of northeast of Brazil . Renewable Energy 2010 ; 35: 2921-2932.

[17] BekeleG ,Tadesse G . Feasibility study of small Hydro/PV/Wind hybrid system for off-grid rural electrification in Ethiopia. Applied Energy 2012; 97: 5–15.

[18] Fluri T.P. The potential of concentrating solar power in South Africa. Energy Policy 2009; 37: 5075–5080. [19] Charabi Y, Gastli A. GIS assessment of large CSP plant in Duqum, Oman. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 2010; 14: 835–841. [20] GastliA ,et al. GIS-based assessment of combined CSP electric power and seawater desalination plant for Duqum-Oman . Renewable and

Sustainable Energy Reviews 2010; 14: 821–827. [21] IRENA Global Atlas for solar and wind Available online at: http:// http://irena.masdar.ac.ae/. [22] Solar_Med_Atlas.Portal, March 2012, available online at: http://www.solar-med-atlas.org. [23] ArcGIS Help Manual.ESRI ArcGIS 8. [24] /http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/. [25]Fu P, Rich P. M.2000.The Solar Analyst 1.0 Manual. Helios Environmental Modeling Institute (HEMI), USA, available online at:

http://www.fs.fed.us/informs/solaranalyst/solar_analyst_users_guide.pdf. [26] Schilings C, Wandrer T, Huld T.“CSP-GIS” for Morocco. Available en ligneat : http://www.endorse-fp7.eu/sites/www.endorse fp7.eu/files/docs/ ENDORSE_WP405_deliverable_v1.1.pdf. [27] J.D, et al. GIS approach to the definission of capacity and generatin ceilings of renewable energy technologies. Energy policy 2007; 10:

4879-4892.

Documents

CSP Sites Suitability Analysis in the Eastern Region of ... · 2010) data for global horizontal and direct normal irradiance for the whole Mediterranean region [22]. The international