Analysis to determine the most suitable location for a photovoltaic solar plant in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
International Journal of Development Research
Analysis to determine the most suitable location for a photovoltaic solar plant in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Received 09th August, 2019; Received in revised form 24th September, 2019; Accepted 06th October, 2019; Published online 30th November, 2019
Copyright © 2019, Marco Pereira de Souza, Luis Claudio Bernardo Moura and Carlos Alberto Nunes Cosenza. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Photovoltaic energy has becoming a viable and non-polluting alternative for generating electricity. In the light of this fact, this study aims to find the most suitable locations for a photovoltaic solar plant in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, considering environmental, technical and economic criteria. The fuzzy logic, with its membership functions, was used to compute the criteria that were applied in the GIS (Geographic Information System). The review of articles using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) provided the degree of importance for each selected criteria. The availability of each of the criteria combined with their relative importance generated a map of the most suitable regions for the location of the photovoltaic solar plant. The results show that the state of Rio de Janeiro has a great potential for photovoltaic solar energy generation, especially in the north coast, near the city of Campos dos Goytacazes, with the lowest potential in the mountainous region, due to the reduced amount of sunshine and greater slope.
