Siting Energy Facilities

Book excerpt: Siting Energy Facilities describes a tool for making the process of finding sites for energy facilities more efficient and more responsive to the concerns of society. The result should be better sites and a siting process that is understandable and defensible. A major focus of the approach is the systematic search for and identification of suitable candidate sites for the proposed facility. The evaluation of the candidate sites explicitly includes environmental impacts, health and safety, socioeconomic effects, and public attitudes, in addition to engineering and economic criteria. The procedure allows the inclusion of the uncertainties and value judgments that are a significant part of all energy siting problems. The material in this book can be categorized into three sections: problem definition, the methodological and procedural aspects of the decision analysis siting approach, and illustrations of its use. The first two chapters define what is meant by an energy facility siting problem and indicate the approach and motivation for the decision analysis siting procedure. Subsequent chapters discuss methodological and procedural details of the approach along with a case study on the selection of a site for a pumped storage power plant.