CSP Sites Suitability Analysis in the Eastern Region of Morocco

AbstractMorocco in general and its eastern region in particular has become one of the target regions for investors in the field of solar energy, since it hosts the Ain Beni Mathar solar thermal power plant and it will host one of the five future CSP power plants fixed by MASEN (the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy). Consequently, it is necessary to identify the most appropriate sites for the installation of the CSP power plants in this region with high precision to profit as much as possible from the solar resource. This paper presents some preliminary results aiming to highlight the suitable areas for the installation of CSP power plants in the eastern region of Morocco using ArcGIS software and a large land exclusion database with “high spatial resolution”. This database has been built based on data sets from governmental organizations and our knowledge about the details of the region. The solar map has been calculated using the hemispherical viewshed algorithm included in the ArcGIS environment. For each layer all spatial information on the defined exclusion criteria was overlaid and marks the non suitable places as white pixels. In a final step, all layers are overlaid and a final map was created showing the suitable and non suitable places. The results show that the eastern region of Morocco has a high suitability to host CSP power plants with more than 65% of its total surface fulfilling the criteria