Placement of Renewable Energy Sources-Based Power Plants Considering Biodiversity Impact Mitigation

This paper addresses renewable energy-based power plants siting under biodiversity constraints and proposes a GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis workflow that optimizes energy yield and ecological performance. We used two methods to formalize ecological performance: a negative-only score calculated as a weighted combination of land cover penalties and normalized bird density, and a peatland restoration credit to capture potential ecological co-benefits. We formulated siting problem as a bi-objective optimization problem on a 100x100 grid, with tradeoffs between maximizing capacity factor and optimizing the ecological influence. We performed a validation procedure for the Krasnoyarsk Krai territory (Russia), including Arctic Zone municipalities. We considered two scenarios: 5 MW…