A First-Phase Screening Device for Site Selection of Large-Scale Solar Plants with an Application to Italy

Increasing the exploitation of renewable energy sources (RES) is a key element for reducing the detrimental consequences of greenhouse gases emissions and for satisfying the growing demand for energy once fossil fuels will be depleted. Among RES, solar power plays a central role having the potential, by itself, to completely satisfy the world energetic needs. Locating optimal sites where to install solar plants becomes then an important task since this choice can a ect the long term probatability of such plants. The present paper proposes a filtering method to select a subset of efficient locations in order to reduce the dimensionality of the original problem when a large territory is screened in order to locate optimal sites for large-scale solar plants. It is based on the idea of preference relations and Pareto dominance and, avoiding to operate an inter-comparison of different locations' attributes, it can be considered as assumptions-free. The second part of the paper applies such filtering method to Italy, a country with relatively high potentials in terms of solar energy that, however, currently lacks an optimal site selection analysis. Once applied, the filter reduces the original set of feasible locations by more than 99%. The resulting Pareto efficient locations, evaluated through five selected criteria, are concentrated in the southern part of Italy and, particularly, in the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.