ABSTRACT
The rapid increase in urbanization is a feature common to every developing city and it comes with its pecks one of which is an increase in the demand for basic amenities like water, road, and electricity. In the Federal capital territory FCT, in recent times, has witnessed a large number of people coming in from different parts of Nigeria which has resulted in the increased demand for electricity supply. The national grid supply will not be sustainable in the end, as has been seen in the regular collapse of the national grid thus; the focus must shift towards other sustainable means of electricity like solar power plants, wind energy sources, nuclear power plants, etc. A Photovoltaic (PV) solar system is an electric power supply source that converts solar energy from the sun to electric energy. Majorly, the efficiency of the solar system depends on the solar radiation received by the surface, which means special consideration must be given to the site where the plants will be located. In this paper, we focused on selecting the suitable sites for locating PV solar power plants in the FCT, Abuja, herein, we considered nine salient criteria which are: global horizontal irradiance, annual average temperature, distance from roads, distance from rivers, distance from powerlines, aspect, slope, and elevation. The analytical hierarchy process was used to reduce error in the decision-making process of the selected criteria by assigning weights to all the nine criteria according to five experts’ opinions while the GIS software was used to prepare the map. The result revealed that about 6% of the total area in the northeastern region of the FCT,
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