Incorporating the visibility of coastal energy infrastructure into multi-criteria siting decisions

Concern about the visibility of large infrastructure development often drives public opposition to these projects. However, insufficient analytical tools to assess visibility across a large number of alternate sites prior to siting typically results in the omission of visibility in multi-criteria siting processes, leading to inferior site selection and often costly litigation. This paper presents an approach for deriving visibility maps based on the location and duration of viewing by residents and visitors and demonstrates its use in illuminating tradeoffs by comparing these maps to wind energy value maps in the context of offshore wind energy development in the Northeastern United States. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).