With the rapid increase in renewable energy demand, various kinds of renewable technologies have been realized. Of particular interest is that they require a certain amount of space, and they may conflict with other land utilization purposes such as food production, protected nature areas, and life-sustaining services, thus the land use pressure is multiplying. For this reason, spatial management is required to analyze the optimal locations for such implementation.

A site suitability analysis is one of the applications that could be used to address this issue. Typically, it was done by mainly examining two constraints: technical and economical criteria, and excluding natural locations from the analysis. The challenge is that without the consideration of an environmental aspect, rich nature areas that are not included in the protection zones, cannot be identified. Therefore, this research aims to conduct the site suitability analysis for ground-based solar energy technology in the Netherlands and advance a suitability model by incorporating the environmental criterion in the assessment.

The study was designed into four phases. Beginning with Phase 1, a compatibility index was developed based on the concept of area degradation. This technique evaluates the compatibility level of an area in terms of an environmental constraint by quantifying the existing land degradation. Subsequently, it was combined with other factors from technical and economical criteria, constructing the suitability index in Phase 2. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a method that was adopted in this combination process. At the end of this phase, five suitability maps were generated from the shift in focus among technical, economical, and environmental criteria. Later in Phase 3, an additional suitability map was developed by analyzing the locations of existing solar projects in the Netherlands. Finally, an example of applying the suitability results was demonstrated in Phase 4 through a case study that set an energy target of 35 TWh as a minimum requirement for solar energy development.

As a result, the preferable locations were specified by the suitability model for this energy realization. They are mostly distributed in the western part of the country (Zeeland, Zuid-Holland, and Noord-Holland provinces) around the major urban and industrial sectors. The proportion of land features in these areas is comprised of 0.4% for border of infrastructure, 17.9% for natural areas, 19.3% for urban areas, and 62.4% for agricultural areas.