Site suitability analysis of biogas power plant using GIS techniques and multicriteria decision aid

As the global transition toward renewable energy continues to gain momentum, the systematic selection of appropriate sites for biogas power plants has become increasingly important in supporting sustainable energy generation and minimizing reliance on traditional electricity sources. Openly accessible remote sensing data have been used in a number of studies on determining suitable location for siting biogas powerplant. However, there is a lack of study that utilize these data to assess the scale of biogas power plant which have impact on the power generating capacity. Considering the size of the biogas power plant, this study investigates the challenge of assessing ideal sites for biogas power plants that use domestic animal ruminants and manure as feedstock, in Gwale, Fagge, and Dala Local Government Areas of Kano State, Nigeria. To handle this complicated multicriteria decision-making problem, GIS techniques and multicriteria decision aid were employed, taking into account both constraints and a range of environmental, economic, safety, and social factors such as proximity to biowaste sources, Land use and land cover, slope, proximity to road, distance from water bodies. The data used for this study were Satellite image (land sat 9 of 2025), Digital Elevation Model, biowaste source’s locations, Road and waterbodies Shape files. Maximum likelihood classifier was utilised for the classification of Landsat 9 into five classes (built up, vegetation, bare surface, farmland and waterbody) to obtain Land use landcover of the study area. Digital Elevation Model was used to generate slope of the study area using slope tool in ArcGS. Biowaste locations, Road, and Waterbodies data were used to generate thematic layers (such as proximity to biowaste, proximity to road and distance from waterbodies, respectively) using Euclidean distance method in ArcGIS. Analytic Hierarchy Process was utilised to rank the thematic layers (factors) according to their importance.  To select the suitable location of biogas power plant, Weighted Overlay technique (MCDA method) in ArcGIS was used. Following the integration of all thematic layers, a final suitability map was produced to evaluate potential locations for biogas power plant development. The analysis revealed that the most suitable sites were concentrated in the Gwale, Dala, and Fagge Local Government Areas of the study area, depending on the scale of the biogas facility. The findings reveal that, more than twenty biogas power plants that utilize animal waste can be established with a total capacity of 55MW. The result also shows that the most suitable sites at Gwale and Fagge has the potential to install a large and medium scale biogas power plant that would generate 1-10 MW and 100KW-1MW of electricity from the generated waste. Based on this findings, establishing biogas power plants might drastically reduce the reliance on conventional electricity.