Slope: Mentioned in The guide “Wind Decision Tree” by NREL and The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) it’s not cost effective to build on slopes greater than 12%. This is due to the fact that a wind turbine would be unstable on such a steep grade. Thus if a slope was higher than 12% it would get a lower score. Rather than remove slopes over 12% as an option to build on we still used them but they got assigned a lower value. We did this because if a farm plot was found with a good score on everything else, we could terrace the land. This would require resources of course and therefore it was classified lower. How we got our data was through taking the Elevation data (see Figure 2.) and then took 2 adjacent points and calculated a slope based on the difference. This created the slope layer(see Figure 1)
Figure 2. U.S. Geological Survey. (1999) National Elevation Dataset (NED) White is higher and Black is lower
Figure 1. The Slope layer. Red is Higher slope, Green is Lower