A Regional Screening Procedure for Land Use Suitability Analysis

Increasing opposition to proposed energy facilities and regulatory delays in licensing have created a pressing need for a comprehensive and objective method to select potential sites. This paper discusses the results of a research project designed to develop and apply an automated regional screening procedure to identify the land use suitability of every land parcel within any candidate region. Although the current project involves energy facilities, the procedure itself should have general capabilities of application to other types of facilities and land uses. It is intended that siting criteria for any particular land use may be examined from the standpoint of several independent siting objecties. The ones examined in this project emphasize engineering, ecological, and socioeconomic considerations. This paper describes, first, the requirments of a regional screening procedure and, second, an applicaton of the Land Use Screening Procedure (LUSP) to northern Maryland. The application is structured to determine the types of siting issues that LUSP is capable of addressing and the extent to which it can be used to identify candidate areas (large areas from which specific sites can be chosen after highly detailed analyses).