Solar energy potential assessment: An overview and a fast modeling approach with application to Italy

Bocca, Alberto; Chiavazzo, Eliodoro; Macii, Alberto; Asinari, Pietro

doi:10.1016/j.rser.2015.04.138

Cited by 23 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(36 reference statements)

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“…For Austria, Latvia, Romania and Slovenia, the land requirements in this scenario are also below 10%: however, for these countries, hydroelectricity contributed over 35% of the electricity consumption in 2009 (see Figure D1). Our results help to explain why, when solar is scaled up, parks are often being located in agricultural areas and biodiversity hotspots (e.g., (Bocca et al, 2015;Hernandez et al, 2015;Squatrito et al, 2014)).…”

Section: % Solar Electricity MIX Scenariomentioning

confidence: 79%

Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios

Capellán‐Pérez

Castro

Arto³

2017

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

181

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The transition to renewable energies will intensify the global competition for land. Nevertheless, most analyses to date have concluded that land will not pose significant constraints on this transition. Here, we estimate the land-use requirements to supply all currently consumed electricity and final energy with domestic solar energy for 40 countries considering two key issues that are usually not taken into account: (1) the need to cope with the variability of the solar resource, and (2) the real land occupation of solar technologies. We focus on solar since it has the highest power density and biophysical potential among renewables. The exercise performed shows that for many advanced capitalist economies the land requirements to cover their current electricity consumption would be substantial, the situation being especially challenging for those located in northern latitudes with high population densities and high electricity consumption per capita. Assessing the implications in terms of land availability (i.e., land not already used for human activities), the list of vulnerable countries enlarges substantially (the EU-27 requiring around 50% of its available land), few advanced capitalist economies requiring low shares of the estimated available land. Replication of the exercise to explore the land-use requirements associated with a transition to a 100% solar powered economy indicates this transition may be physically unfeasible for countries such as Japan and most of the EU-27 member states. Their vulnerability is aggravated when accounting for the electricity and final energy footprint, i.e., the net embodied energy in international trade. If current dynamics continue, emerging countries such as India might reach a similar situation in the future. Overall, our results indicate that the transition to renewable energies maintaining the current levels of energy consumption has the potential to create new vulnerabilities and/or reinforce existing ones in terms of energy and food security and biodiversity conservation.

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Section: % Solar Electricity MIX Scenariomentioning

confidence: 79%

Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios

Capellán‐Pérez

Castro

Arto³

2017

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

181

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…[32], which concerned solar energy potential analysis of PV installations at optimal mounting, that is, at azimuth ¼ 0 and optimally inclined-surface of PV panels (i.e. optimal tilt angle).…”

Section: The Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, here we take into account the whole range of possible tilt angles for the installed PV modules, namely from 0 to 90 , whereas only the optimal tilt angle was considered in Ref. [32].…”

Section: The Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating photovoltaic energy potential from a minimal set of randomly sampled data

et al. 2016

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a b s t r a c tThe remarkable rise of photovoltaics in the world over the past years testifies of the great improvement in the use of solar energy. Opportunities for further new PV installations are being sought, especially power plants in areas with as yet little exploited solar energy potential. In this paper, we describe a methodology for generating estimation models of PV electricity for installations in large regions where only a few scattered data or measurement stations are available. For validation only, application of this methodology was performed considering Italy, where estimations can be benchmarked using the Photovoltaic Geographical Information System (PVGIS) by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The results show that the mean absolute errors were usually lower than 4%, compared to the PVGIS data, for about 90% of the estimates of PV electricity, and about 6% for the greatest mean error.

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“…Therefore, in order to improve the accuracy and reliability of a site for PV power system installation, it is necessary to come up with an evaluation method that takes multiple factors and ambiguous and subjective judgments into consideration and quantifies them for comparison. This study introduces the extension method [2] in combination with the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) [3] to break complicated decision-making scenarios into smaller parts that can be organized into a hierarchical tree. Each of these parts is given a weight based on its relative importance, and the weight is calculated after the priority of each part is determined.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Application of an extension method on optimal site selection for PV power systems: A case study in Taiwan

Huang

Wang

et al. 2018

IEEJ Transactions Elec Engng

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Photovoltaic (PV) power investors mainly consider the investment cost and payback period when settling on a new PV power site. This study applies the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to decompose complex decision-making problems into several subproblems, which are then organized into a tree-like structure. The relative importance of each subproblem is weighted to prevent subjective cognitive differences when setting the weight for each factor. Subsequently, this study adopts the extension theory to solve the contradictory problems generated during quality assessments, to analyze the principal factors influencing the installation sites for PV power systems, and to evaluate optimal installation sites. This study further integrates AHP with a quality assessment method based on the extension theory to select the optimal site for installing PV power systems. Factors affecting installation sites comprise sunshine, temperature, PV cell conversion efficiency, feed-in tariffs, investment payback period, interest rate on bank loans, land rental, and installation costs. Sites located in Northern, Central, and Southern Taiwan and the outlying islands of Taiwan were analyzed. Finally, results from the analysis verify that the method proposed herein generates results quickly and is easy to use. Therefore, the proposed method can help select the optimal installation site for PV power systems.

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Solar energy potential assessment: An overview and a fast modeling approach with application to Italy

Cited by 23 publications

References 38 publications

Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios

Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios

Estimating photovoltaic energy potential from a minimal set of randomly sampled data

Application of an extension method on optimal site selection for PV power systems: A case study in Taiwan

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