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It aims to compute the solar thermal and the photovoltaic energy potential and the financial feasibility of a selected area by considering:
The input parameters and layers as well as output layers and parameters are as follows.
Input layers and parameters are:
Output layers and parameters are:
Starting from the available area and the kind of PV technology the module computes the PV energy production under the following assumptions:
These assumptions have been done in order to consider a planning phase for a region and not the design of a specific PV systems.
The yearly energy output is derived by considering the spatial distribution of yearly solar radiation on the building footprint. The PV energy production is computed for a single representative plant. The most representative installed peak power for a PV system is an input of the module. Consequently, the surface covered by a single plant and the total number of plants are computed.
Finally, the most suitable area is computed by considering the roofs with higher energy production. The energy production of each pixel considers to cover only a fraction of the roofs equal to f_roof. The integral of the energy production of the most suitable area is equal to the total energy production of the selected area.
Here, the calculation module is run for the Lombardy region in Italy (NUTS2).
Follow the steps as shown in the figure below:
Now, the "Solar PV Potential" opens and is ready to run.
The default input values considers the possibility to install roof-mounted PV panels on buildings. These values rerers to a plant of 3 kWp. You may need to set values bellow or above default values considering additional local considerations and costs. Therefore, the user should adapt these values to find the best combination of thresholds for his or her case study.
To run the calculation module, follow the next steps:
Depending on your experience and local knowledge, you may increase or decrease the input values to obtain better results. You may decide to increase the building surface suitable for PV plants.
Assign a name to the run session (optional - here, we chose "Test Run 2") and set the input parameters Percentage of buildings with solar panels equal to 50. It means that we are covering the 50% of the available building roofs. Notice that since each pixel can represent more than one building and we are not covering the whole roof with PV panels, the user can set also the Effective building roof utilization factor. The default values is set to 0.15. This means that only the 15% of the roof surface in a pixel is covered by PV panels.
Wait until the process is finished.
Giulia Garegnani, in Hotmaps-Wiki, https://github.com/HotMaps/hotmaps_wiki/wiki/CM-Solar-PV-potential (April 2019)
This page is written by Giulia Garegnani*.
* Urban and Regional Energy System Group - EURAC Bozen
Institute of Renewable Energy Drususallee/Viale Druso 1 I-39100 Bozen/Bolzano Italy
Copyright © 2016-2019: Giulia Garegnani
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 International License.
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
License-Text: https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html
We would like to convey our deepest appreciation to the Horizon 2020 Hotmaps Project (Grant Agreement number 723677), which provided the funding to carry out the present investigation.
Last edited by GiuliaConforto, 2020-09-02 09:33:51