3D Solarweb: A solar cadaster in the Italian Alpine landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The paper presents the research carried out in the on-going 3DSolarWeb project to test and implement a complete pipeline for the generation of a solar cadastre of building roofs located in alpine areas. The project aims at providing reliable results in a costeffective way, using (low resolution) available data and new aerial imagery acquisitions as input. The environmental context is digitally represented using already existing low resolution LiDAR data (1-2 m resolution), while the urban area is modelled using high resolution aerial images (10-20 cm GSD) and photogrammetric DSM. Reliable models and algorithms for the estimation of the incoming sun radiance are then adopted and a WebGIS is set up for the interactive calculation of the photovoltaic (PV) potential in a raster-based form. The paper summarizes the entire pipeline and the results (Figure 1) achieved on the test areas to show the potentialities of the method and the web-based service. a) b) c) Figure 1. Results of the photogrammetric DSM generation from aerial images (a), true orthophoto (b) and solar potential energy estimation visualized with the raster-based webGIS tool created within the 3DSolarWeb project (c).

Trends and Evolution of the GIS-Based Photovoltaic Potential Calculation

“…When observing the validation process of the observed data, the first element that emerges is that in many cases only a component of the final calculation is validated, for both PV potential and solar radiation analysis. While [48,65] used real PV production data-despite considering two validation sets vastly different in terms of dimension, with respectively 2 and 252 panels-other studies validated partial results only. For example, in [58] only the global radiation was measured.…”

“…Another set of papers used correction factors on solar radiation to compute the photovoltaic potential. Nex et al [65] take into account an alpine area, where the impact of temperature on the module's efficiency is highly relevant. Therefore, the authors adopted correction factors based on temperature to estimate the losses derived from unfavorable conditions.…”

Towards a Renewable Energy Source Cadastre—A Review of Examples from around the World

“…Similar considerations guided a research team from Trento (northern Italy), which published a study in 2012 on the estimation of solar irradiance of building roofs in complex alpine landscapes [47]. A year later, in a slightly expanded composition, the team published their idea to introduce a third dimension into the calculation [48]. The analyses were carried out in and around the city of Transacqua (Trento province, northern Italy).…”

Multi-Modal Geospatial and Thematic Data to Foster Green Deal Applications

“…• building footprint extraction from point clouds (Wu et al, 2018;Buyukdemircioglu et al, 2022); • 3D building/city model generation (Lafarge and Mallet., 2012;Biljecki et al, 2015;Özdemir and Remondino, 2018); • photovoltaic potential estimation of building roof or other suitable areas (Nex et al, 2013;Giannelli et al, 2022); • urban heat island analysis and forecasting (Voelkel and Shandas, 2017;Bosch et al, 2021;Ellena et al, 2023); • urban tree mapping using hyperspectral and LiDAR data fusion (Dalponte et al, 2013;Ballanti et al, 2020); • derivation of urban ecological indexes (Darvishzadeh et al, 2009;Heiden et al, 2012;Sun et al, 2021).…”