Wind and Solar Candidate Project Areas for Princeton REPEAT

This data set contains the GIS data for solar, land-based wind, and offshore wind Candidate Project Areas (CPAs) under base  (BLUA). Each record in this dataset represents a “Candidate Project Area” with attributes such as nameplate capacity, annual generation, model region, distance to transmission, etc. The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab MAPRE tools (https://mapre.lbl.gov/gis-tools/) were used to create this dataset, along with input assumptions adapted from Wu et al 2020 (Grace C Wu et al 2020 Environ. Res. Lett. 15 074044) and E. Larson, C. Greig, J. Jenkins, E. Mayfield, A. Pascale, C. Zhang, J. Drossman, R. Williams, S. Pacala, R. Socolow, EJ Baik, R. Birdsey, R. Duke, R. Jones, B. Haley, E. Leslie, K. Paustian, and A. Swan, Net-Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts, interim report, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, December 15, 2020.

What's new in this version: 

Solar:

Prime farmland eligible for utility scale solar development throughout the study area.

Solar configuration: single-axis tracking solar assumed per VCE data

Additional attributes calculated: 

Aspect indicates the compass direction toward which a slope faces, measured in degrees from North in a clockwise direction from 0 to 360.  Surface is flat where aspect_min = -1 (Source: https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5540ec40e4b0a658d7939628)

Wind: additional airspace and military exclusions applied 

Airfields with arrivals and departures > 1000 buffered by 5 mi

Weather radar stations buffered 5 mi

NEXRAD radar buffered 3 km

Military installations, ranges and training areas buffered 5 mi

Wind: additional attributes calculated: 

VFR navigation landmarks  (buffered 2 nautical mi)

Navaid systems (buffered 8 nautical mi)

Special Use Airspace (floor <=1000 ft)

Additional attribute for both solar and wind:

m_landcover indicates landcover type (per USGS NLCD 2016. https://www.mrlc.gov/data/legends/national-land-cover-database-2016-nlcd2016-legend)