Robust Wind Energy Prioritization Under Infrastructure and Data Constraints: A National Spatial Framework for Yemen

Identifying areas for further wind energy investigation requires information on wind resources, accessibility, and land availability. Yet national screening may select similar areas of land while identifying different locations as assumptions change. This study assesses the geographic persistence of wind energy priorities in Yemen and how alternative electricity network maps affect the interpretation of persistent locations. On a common 1 km grid, wind power density at 100 m and road proximity determine priority, while land exclusions determine fractional availability. Cell recurrence is evaluated across 36 spatial preference analyses and a separate 17-setting weight sweep, with complementary resource formulation and processing diagnostics. Changing the road response function leaves the selected area nearly unchanged but yields a cell set Jaccard similarity of 0.722. Under the reference WPD formulation, their strict intersection retains 14,968 cells covering 12,805.42 km2 (32.9% of reference top 10% area). Alternative resource formulations also change core membership. For these fixed locations, 20.02% of available land lies within 50 km of mapped historical transmission, compared with 68.61% under modeled GridFinder. Governorate patterns and Socotra’s protected area sensitivity reveal differences obscured by national totals. These findings guide resource, land, and electricity infrastructure verification before project-level assessment.