Mapping feasible renewable transition space: Land-use, conservation, and grid-access constraints on wind and solar in British Columbia

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Offers an open-source spatial modeling approach for renewable energy feasibility that can be adapted to other regions or integrated with energy system models.

🏢実務担当者:Useful for renewable energy developers and utility planners to identify viable project sites and assess constraints transparently.

🏛政策担当者:Provides a tool for evidence-based land-use and energy policy, enabling assessment of trade-offs between conservation and renewable deployment.

Rapid wind and solar deployment are central to decarbonization, yet feasible deployment is shaped by energy geography: the spatial distribution of resource quality, land use, and -grid-network accessibility. Sub-national plans often rely on siting assumptions that are opaque and difficult to audit, limiting comparability and legitimate deliberation over trade-offs. We present RESource, an open-source workflow that makes siting constraints explicit and reproducible by translating land-use rules, environmental safeguards, and grid proximity into optimization-ready wind and solar supply curves. The framework integrates transparent spatial exclusions, configurable buffers, distance-based connection-cost proxies, and technology-specific hourly capacity-factor profiles under stable geospatial identifiers. Applied to British Columbia, Canada, we find that under the stated scenario assumptions conservation stringency is the dominant constraint on accessible potential. A strict-conservation policy scenario reduces accessible wind capacity by about 44% and solar by about 74% relative to baseline, whereas removing all setback buffers or imposing a 50 km grid-proximity limit changes accessible capacity by 6% or less. The results reveal pronounced spatial heterogeneity in screened costs and feasibility, with viable transition corridors concentrating in interior and northern regions where resource quality, developable land and grid access align. By making exclusions, buffers, and grid costs explicit and auditable, RESource lowers barriers for municipalities, Indigenous nations, and system planners to produce transparent siting assessments. The code and data are openly available (GitHub: https://github.com/DeltaE/RESource ; Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16658066 ).

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energ.2026.100077first seen 2026-07-27 04:46:11