GIS FOR RENEWABLE AND SUSTAINABLE ENERGY “SITING WIND FARMS IN EGYPT”

Many countries including Egypt, are having difficulty in providing different sources of energy. Therefore, many countries are heading towards finding new clean and sustainable sources of energy instead of the current means of producing energy with its environmental and economic operational problems. New power generations are currently developed based on the utilization of renewable and sustainable energy depending on the availability of such resources in the country.Protecting the country’s natural resources and enhancing those resources, which have suffered from degradation stand as important features of the country’s sustainable development goals. Presence of an effective system for managing the country’s sustainable development goals becomes important and essential. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) proved to be one of the most important technological tools the country can employ in order to tackle this issue.Many countries are already using GIS to plan and implement programs to promote sustainable socio-economic and environmental development. It is useful to sustain our resource using wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass energy. It is also important to search for cleaner, smarter, and more conscientious methods of energy production, transmission, and distribution. GIS is not only improving the way we produce and deliver energy, but it is also changing the way we view our earth's resources.Renewable energy (RE) projects are too expensive to make random decisions related to site selection, therefore GIS is a powerful tool in querying and selecting the most suitable locations for constructing RE projects.This paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of GIS technology in locating the most suitable locations for constructing wind farms from urban planning point of view through determining a list of criteria, in order to generate new means of energy to preserve the natural resources to the coming generations