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Our Goal:As forward-looking policy on climate change seems less and less likely on the na-tional level, it has fallen to states, cities, and individual citizens to shoulder the bur-den. Replacing fossil fuel power plants with renewable energy generation is one of the most effective tools we have to slow climate change. To this end, we sought to site a new solar farm in the bay area that would provide clean, price-competitive power without fossil fuels while maintaining local control over power supplies.

Potential clients include PG&E, which might be interested in adding local renew-ables to its energy portfolio. If not, the Bay Area as a community serves as our cli-ent, since small scale solar farms offer a chance at independence from the grid for adjacent residents.

Our Methods:

1. Suitability Analysis:

3. Network Analysis and Results

National Elevation Dataset

Population Data

Land Use data

Direct Normal Irradiance Clip national data to Bay, reclassify val-ues to 1-9 for suitability analysis.

Calculate slopes from NED data, classify slopes from 1-5 (steep to gentle).

Export vacant, barren, and native vegeta-tion coded land, convert to a raster, weight the polygons with data (suitable) as 5.

Buffer regions with population density > 10,000 using euclidian distance with 1 mi intervals. This generates concentric zones around high popluation areas. We weighted zones closer to high popula-tion more favorably. (on a 1-9 scale).

Combine the four layers using a raster calculator. This adds all of the weight values together, and generates the fol-lowing map.

2. 3D Analysis:We then selected plots with a suitability value exceeding +26. Draping the suit-ability map over the NED data allowed us to visualize which of these plots were feasible in terms of slope.

This allowed us to pick three ideal sites in the area circled.

Next, we added all available plots (the land use opportunity layer from our suit-ability analysis) to the map, to determine which highly suitable plots where actual-ly available.

Site 2Site 1 Site 3

We then ran slope analyses on all three sites. Although fitting the graphs here is impossible, the range on the y-axis demonstrates that each of the sites showed limited height variance, perfect for solar farm installation. (measurements in feet)

Using the following data, we algebraically calculat-ed how much power each site could generate, and how many people could potentially be served by each loca-tion.

We then ran a maximize attendance network analysis on the three candidate sites, using access to highways as a proxy for access to powerlines. This determined which census blocks would have their entire yearly energy needs covered by each of the three solar farms.

The Result0.Site 3 can serve the greatest number of resi-dents by a wide margin. However, each of the three sites can service the power needs of thou-sands cleanly, while the local nature of the pow-er supply allows these people to control their own power supplies. Thus, we hope that our project provides a convincing argument for the construction of solar farms on these plts.

Ross Lelieur, Jack Mooney, Miguel Nieto LDARCH c188