Siting Energy Facilities

by Ralph L. Keeney

Siting Energy Facilities describes a tool for making the process of finding sites for energy facilities more efficient and more responsive to the concerns of society. The result should be better sites and a siting process that is understandable and defensible. A major focus of the approach is the systematic search for and identification of suitable candidate sites for the proposed facility. The evaluation of the candidate sites explicitly includes environmental impacts, health and safety, socioeconomic effects, and public attitudes, in addition to engineering and economic criteria. The procedure allows the inclusion of the uncertainties and value judgments that are a significant part of all energy siting problems. The material in this book can be categorized into three problem definition, the methodological and procedural aspects of the decision analysis siting approach, and illustrations of its use. The first two chapters define what is meant by an energy facility siting problem and indicate the approach and motivation for the decision analysis siting procedure. Subsequent chapters discuss methodological and procedural details of the approach along with a case study on the selection of a site for a pumped storage power plant.

413 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Ralph L. Keeney received Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, Duke University, and Research Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern California. His areas of expertise are the decision sciences, risk analysis, and systems management. He is an authority on decision analysis, decision making with multiple objectives, and value-focused thinking. During his professional career, Dr. Keeney has consulted on a wide range of decisions including corporate management problems, public policy, environmental problems, and energy decisions.

He has been a consultant for several organizations including Fair Isaac, Seagate Technology, American Express, British Columbia Hydro, Pacific Gas and Electric, BC Gas , Kaiser Permanente, Hewlett-Packard, the Electric Power Research Institute, Greater Vancouver Regional District, Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg AG (Germany), Ministry of Public Works (Mexico), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria), U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Professor Keeney's books, which have been translated into numerous languages, include Decisions with Multiple Objectives with Howard Raiffa (1976, 1993), ValueFocused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking (1992), and Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, with John S. Hammond and Howard Raiffa (1999). He recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo in Canada and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the U.S.