Optimal solar plant site selection

Energy sector problems are likely to become more urgent in an environment of limited community financial sources and precarious production environment. These conditions reinforce the encouragements of dealing with energy efficiency and diversification of energy resources in some countries. The growth in energy consumption is a response to the economic growth, industrialization, and growing demands in citizen's lifestyle. Therefore, innovative solutions for energy resources become an essential need. This paper reviews the solar energy's current status in the Middle East and North Africa. It also proposes an algorithm for optimizing solar plants site selection. The solar plant sites are normally located in remote areas that characterized by high sun radiations. Unfortunately, those areas could be far from the load centers. So, those remote sites will definitely suffer from higher transmission losses than sites that are close the load centers. The proposed optimization algorithm will be applied to both Photo Voltaic (PV) and Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants.