A multicriteria approach to evaluate offshore wind farms siting in Greece

Wind energy offers significant potential for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Most applications
have been developed onshore but the planning and siting conflicts with other land uses have created
considerable interest and motivated research to offshore wind energy establishments.
In this paper, a systematic methodology in order to investigate the most efficient areas of offshore
wind farms’ siting in Greece is performed, integrating multi-criteria decision making (MCDM)
methods and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools.
In the first level of analysis, all coastal areas that don’t fulfill a certain set of criteria (wind velocity,
protected areas, water depth) are identified with the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
and excluded from further analysis. The Analytical Hierarchy Process is performed in the evaluation
phase and pairwise comparisons provide the most appropriate sites to locate offshore wind farms.
Information concerning evaluation criteria (average wind velocity, distance to protected areas,
distance to ship routes, distance to the shore and distance of possible connection to the existing
electricity network) is retrieved through GIS, eliminating the subjectivity in judgments. The whole
methodology contributes to the portrait of the geographic analysis and stands as the last image of
the space characteristics suitable for offshore wind farms.