Ranking sustainable areas for the development of tidal power plants: A case study in the northern coastline of Brazil.

Summary: This study proposed an environmental sustainability index (ESI) to aid the identification of suitable areas for the installation of tidal power plants (TPPs) in coastal areas. Geographic Information System (GIS) and multicriteria analysis (MCA) were integrated to construct the proposed method. ESI consisted of a subindex of environmental fragility (EFI) with six components (geology, geomorphology, vegetation, slope, pedology, and land use), selected from the scientific literature. Therefore, the method serves as a guiding tool for coastal regions without existing information on the environmental impacts generated by this type of energy system. A consultation process with experts, the Delphi method, was conducted to assign weights to the components and subcomponents of the proposed ESI method. The study tested the method on a case study at the sector III of the coastal zone of the state of Pará (CZP), Brazil. The simulations considered scenarios with the installation of TPP of different scales. Scores close to 3 were considered less fragile sites in the ESI. The municipalities with the best ESI performance were São Sebastião da Boa Vista for scenarios I (2.7721) and II (2.126), and Soure for scenario III (1.9908). Moreover, ESI analysis revealed that small tidal dams for sector III are more feasible than medium and large dams. The use of GIS integrated with MCA provided a useful tool to analyze different parameters and visualize areas with the greatest environmental potential. There are challenges associated with complexity of MCA, dependency on expert's opinion, and subjectivity of the weighting system. In addition, limited data is available for the region, which hindered us to explore more fragility parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]