Planning of the installation of offshore renewable energies: A GIS approach of the Portuguese roadmap

The present paper presents the methodology and development of a planning tool for the installation of marine renewable energy systems, which enables the identification of suitable areas for this purpose. The marine spatial planning is one of the challenges of the offshore renewable energies. This is one of the reasons to write this paper, because there are areas where the energy potential is great but with real limitations for installing an offshore renewable energy farm. This methodology is based on the development of automated and interactive GIS tools in order to enable the user to change inputs according to his research objectives. The developed tools are applied to a case study referring to the Portuguese coast and the obtained results enable the identification of several areas, suitable for the development of marine renewable energies projects. The methodology and the developed tools intend to be a contribution for the Maritime Spatial Planning of the Portuguese coast and can be applied to other countries as well whenever the necessary information is available.