| Abstract |
Climate change necessitates the relevance of renewable energy utilization worldwide. The Green Deal defines the energy development policy in Europe until 2030. This challenge holds particular significance for Ukraine in the context of post-war energy infrastructure recovery. Therefore, an important issue is the analysis of the suitability of Ukrainian territories for the installation of large-scale solar power plants (solar farms) and the optimization of their placement. This research aims to determine the suitability of Ukrainian territories for solar power plant placement using satellite data on climate and terrain characteristics. Among the factors determining the suitability of the territory for solar farms, the greatest impact lies in climatic indicators, including data on the total global horizontal solar irradiation (GHI), accumulated temperature above 25 degrees C at a height of 2 meters, average annual wind speed, and map of accumulated annual precipitation from the ERA5-Land dataset. In this study, terrain maps containing information on elevations, slopes, and terrain shading from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) project were also used to determine the suitability of the territories. The suitability of the territories is determined through geospatial analysis using weighted sums. Based on the research results, a suitability map was constructed, depicting the distribution of zones with different suitability coefficients (ranging from 0 to 1). It was found that a significant portion of Ukraine's territory is favorable for the placement of solar power plants. Over 48 % of the country has moderate suitability values (0.3...0.4). The obtained suitability map was used to analyze the optimal placement of already constructed major solar power plants in Ukraine. Data from Wikimapia was utilized to determine the locations of these energy facilities. Overall, all the analyzed large-scale solar power plants in Ukraine were situated in optimal territories. The research also revealed that certain regions, such as Odesa, Poltava, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Donetsk, and Luhansk, have good suitability values (0.3...0.4) but are not fully utilized. These areas have significant potential for the future construction of powerful and productive solar power plants. |