Topic: Geospatial Evaluation of Solar Potential for Hydrogen Production Site Suitability: GIS-MCDA Approach for Off-Grid and Utility or Large-Scale Systems over Niger

Climate change mitigation requires environmental friendly and flexible alternative to fossil fuels such as green hydrogen with its renewable nature. The untapped huge solar radiation of Niger represents an opportunity to investigate green hydrogen production potential. Hence, this study proposes a novel geospatial multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework to perform site suitability analysis of solar photovoltaic (PV) based hydrogen potential for both off-grid and utility or large-scale systems over Niger. This research methodology combined land eligibility using the Geospatial Land Availability for Energy System (GLAES) tool and multi-criteria-based site suitability approaches involving environmental, socio-economic and technical criteria weighting applying an Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP). The results show that the land eligibility analysis performed using GLAES demonstrates that 67.89 % (889,834 square kilometer) of the Niger territory is deemed eligible, while 32.11 % (420,738 square kilometer) represents the excluded constraints. The land suitability analysis for off-grid system shows that 32.36 % (421,842 square kilometer) has low suitability, 2.19 % (28,621 square kilometer) is considered moderately suitable, 26.1 % (340,184 square kilometer) of the eligible area has a strong suitability and 7.05 % (91,920 square kilometer) represents the most suitable area for hydrogen production. Similarly, land suitability analysis was performed for Grid-connected and large-scale system solar power plants to evaluate hydrogen potential. The framework of this study can be used as a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for policymakers and stakeholders to develop hydrogen roadmaps and strategies.