Methodological Framework for Determining the Land Eligibility of Renewable Energy Sources

The quantity and distribution of land which is eligible for renewable energy sources is fundamental to the role these technologies will play in future energy systems. As it stands, however, the current state of land eligibility investigation is found to be insufficient to meet the demands of the future energy modelling community. Three key areas are identified as the predominate causes of this; inconsistent criteria definitions, inconsistent or unclear methodologies, and inconsistent dataset usage. To combat these issues, a land eligibility framework is developed and described in detail. The validity of this framework is then shown via the recreation of land eligibility results found in the literature, showing strong agreement in the majority of cases. Following this, the framework is used to perform an evaluation of land eligibility criteria within the European context whereby the relative importance of commonly considered criteria are compared.