Evaluating the Eligibility of Abandoned Agricultural Land for the Development of Wind Energy in Lithuania

Land requirements of wind power (WP) are often seen as a constraint to future broad-scale deployment. The aim the study is evaluate eligibility abandoned agricultural land (AAL) areas, covered with woody plants, for development energy (WE) in Lithuania. Agricultural abandonment (ALA) has numerous negative aspects and its use WE must be profitable choice landowner, developers also. A newly developed methodological approach, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method known TOPSIS (the Technique Order Preference by Similarity Ideal Solution) was applied select suitable areas plants (WPP). authors have used various data sets, follows: protected (reserves, parks) combined into one common geographic information system (GIS) layer, forest cadaster data, water (lakes, rivers) area layer; buildings taken from Lithuania Georeferenced Data Base. results were generated entire territory separately AAL using algorithms open source QGIS program. showed that central part most WE. However, ALA this low, because high soil yield potential conditions farming. According selection criteria, about 7% WE, more than 18% an average suitability.