A GIS tool for the land carrying capacity of large solar plants

A tool for the estimation of the land carrying capacity of large solar plants, such as ground-mounted PV plants or solar thermal plants, is developed in GIS environment. The scope is to verify to what extent the constraints that governments and authorities have imposed on the construction of new large ground-mounted soalr plants affect the future developments of PV. The tool is applied to a large study area of North-Italy and specifically to solar photovoltaic plants but the results can be easily generalized to include large solar thermal plants. The peculiarity of the tool development is that both qualitative and quantitative criteria are merged together in order to obtain the final indicator, and that the weight of the objective function are estimated by means of an ANN. The available area are very limited and strongly influenced by the normative qualitative criteria (restricted areas).