# 221

Dear Junrey Garcia, Jerome Gacu, and Mark Lawrence

I read your paper:

Suitability Analysis for Solar PV Farm Installation using GIS and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in Simara Island, Province of Romblon, Philippines

My comments

1- In the abstract, could you explain what is QGIS? Remember that not all readers may be acquainted with this technology, and its difference with GIS.

2- “highly suitable, suitable, moderately suitable, marginally suitable, and unsuitable locations. Results show that most of the island is suitable for solar PV farm installation at 42.81%, while 39.73% accounting for highly suitable locations. Moderately suitable and marginally suitable sites account for 8.76% and 1.07%, respectively, and 7.63% is deemed unsuitable”

I believe that this is a good classification of suitability of the island’s different areas, however, I wonder how you reached these quantified estimates, because suitability is not only solar irradiation, as you know. Irradiation is certainly the most important feature but it is not enough, because you can have excellent areas regarding irradiation, but that cannot be considered, due to their very high air temperature, or excessive slope, or far from transmission lines. I think that you can only reach these values after you have taken into account them all, which is the purpose of your study.

3- “Demonstrating the effectiveness of the GIS and AHP combined methodology”

I am afraid I disagree, not in the use of GIS, because it is a scientific tool, but in your use of AHP, employed to quantify the relative importance of areas using subjectivity, even if it comes from different experts. Why? Because in this case, say that you have 15 criteria, involving irradiation, temperature, humidity, slope, distance to cities, job generation, costs, etc. and then, you would need 15 experts that are experts on each one of the 15 areas, or you can compare say job generation with costs, with a social worker for the first and an accountant for the second, experts in their respective areas, but ignorant on the other and vice versa. It is too much to pretend that these two experts agree, when they are speaking in ‘different languages.

4- Page 2 “It comprises 15 barangays and each barangay consists of puroks while some have sitios. Figure 1 below shows the map of Simara Island showing the 15 different barangays.”

And what do these names mean?

5- Page 4 “that a solar radiation of 1300 kWh·m2/year (3.5 kWh·m2/year) should be considered. However, the temperature of the location should also be considered since the temperature affects the efficiency of solar PV cells where temperature rise of1 °C, the photoelectric efficiency of solar cells drops by 0.1–0.5%”

This point is fundamental, perhaps more important than solar irradiation

6- Fig 2 shows the main criteria and most of them, if not all, are related for instance C1, C2 and C4, consequently you cannot use AHP, that demands criteria independently. This was specified by AHP creator, T. Saaty. You could use them in ANP but not in AHP

7- Page 10 “The panel of experts composed of ten (10) individuals from the academe and industry were asked to give opinion and weights on the parameters mentioned above and the result was formed into a pairwise comparison matrix”

Why do you need experts to give a value or weight for each layer when using Inter in ArcGIS you can get this data accurately? In addition, where these experts explained about the irrationality of assigning a cardinal value to a preference? Nobody asked? Nobody got curious, and if some posed a question, what was the answer given? That the method was build in that way?

8- In my opinion, in Table 2, you are short of criteria by not considering aspects as environmental damage, health, job generation, life cycle, construction cost, maintenance cost, considering temperature and humidity together, land use, service roads, etc.

These are my comments. I hope they can be of help

Nolberto Munier