GIS Support for California Renewable Energy Strategic Value Analysis

California is committed to meeting electricity demand challenges with an aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standard and Energy Action Plan calling for 20 percent renewable energy resources by 2010. The California Energy Commission's Strategic Value Analysis (SVA) develops a pathway for the growth and integration of future renewable energy generation (wind, geothermal, biomass, solar, and water). This will address and prevent future electrical grid problems while simultaneously prioritizing transmission needs, deferring costly upgrades, and providing additional nonenergy benefits for the environment and economy. The assessment of renewable wind resources is a part of the SVA project. Using GIS, this analysis displays wind energy potential areas and quantifies gross, technical, and economic potential of wind energy.

Substantial amounts of California's renewable wind energy remain untapped. Using the annual mean wind speed and power density data from AWS TrueWind, LLC, the Fire and Resource Assessment Program of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, under contract to the California Energy Commission, created a number of wind speed and power density surface models corresponding to four different heights (hub height) above ground. Based on these surface models, suitable windy lands are classified.

Using the average wind energy generation capacity, wind energy generation gross potential is computed from the sum of classified windy areas at four hub heights individually. To ascertain developable values, a number of technical and economic filters were applied to refine the gross potential. Since electrical grid upgrade and connection costs increase with the distance from wind resource to substation, a 10-mile buffer zone was placed around key substations and overlaid on potential wind areas, providing areas with potential economic viability at moderate costs.