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 onshore wind power and 5 MW solar power plants. Considering the net ecological impact, the preferred siting area shifts even with the same capacity factor layer and feasibility mask. This demonstrates that the framework is scenarioagnostic and can be adapted by changing the impact definitions and weights. During the case study, we used Pareto-optimal candidates to show that environmental pressure can often be reduced with modest energy yield losses. Limitations of the study include coarse environmental layers, deterministic climate assumptions, and the lack of cost and social criteria. These limitations motivate higher-resolution and uncertainty-aware extensions of the framework.