concept wind farm in category geoprocessing

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Geoprocessing with Python. Login to get full access to this book.

7.3. Example: locating areas suitable for wind farms

Let’s do a simple analysis to look for suitable wind farm locations in Imperial County, California. The United States National Renewal Energy Laboratory provides a wind dataset that shows areas in the United States that are suitable for wind farms based on wind speed and abundance, and geographical factors such as terrain (figure 7.8). Areas are rated on a scale of 1 to 7, where anything 3 and above is generally considered suitable. We’ll combine this with census data to locate areas with an appropriate wind rating and a population less than 0.5 per square kilometer.

Figure 7.8. Census and wind data for Imperial County, CA. The darker the shading, the better the wind conditions for a wind farm. The hatched area shows census tracts with a population density less than 0.5/km2.