Decision support requirements for wind farm placement planning in Alberta

Abstract

Current trends in Alberta require the involvement of multiple stakeholders and decision support tools in planning the placement of wind farms. While the use of decision support tools can assist stakeholders in making decisions, developing useful tools for a domain as complex as wind farm placement planning is challenging. In addition, few design requirements exist to ensure that decision support tools are specific to local needs, and that they have capabilities to support stakeholders in making informed decisions about placement locations. To this end, we conducted a study, using questionnaires and interviews, to: (1) identify the main issues that influence wind farm placement and land use decisions in Alberta; (2) identify stakeholders’ decision support needs for evaluating wind farm placement decisions, and how these needs can be incorporated in a decision support tool; (3) gain a deeper understanding of how stakeholders in Alberta currently interact with existing tools, and identify areas where design can improve usability; and (4) derive usability attributes that can inform the development of a decision support tool for wind farm placement planning in Alberta. Based on the study findings, we propose some design recommendations which highlight the relevance of a place-based decision support tool with visual and analytical attributes.

Keywords:

• decision support
• requirements gathering
• wind farms
• design
• land use
• stakeholders

Acknowledgment

We thank our participants and wind energy stakeholders in Alberta for their contributions to this work. The work in this paper was supported in part by funding from the Institute of Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy (ISEEE), the Computational Media Design programme (CMD), the InnoVis group in Interactions Lab, Faculty of Environmental Design (EVDS) at the University of Calgary, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), SMART Technologies, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures (AITF), The SurfNet Network, Graphics, Animation, New media and Design (GRAND), and National Centre for Excellence (NCE). We gratefully acknowledge the editorial contributions of Dr. Cormack Gates. We thank the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.