Mapping Solar Potential of Tartu

Abstract

As the photovoltaic (PV) systems become more and more popular and developed there also grows the need for tools that would help to estimate the usability and impact of such systems on a larger scale. The use case addressed in this work is estimation of solar energy production on the city scale. This information could help city governments to easier find ways to increase solar energy production and, hence, improve energy efficiency of their city. Such information could be obtained by analyzing the rooftops of the building in the city and, luckily, datasets with detailed city geometry for Estonian cities are publicly available. With regards to photovoltaic systems, the datasets mentioned above can be used as a starting point to analyze the roofs, extracting the attributes such as area, tilt and location for further processing. In this work the author aimed to create a solution that would allow to estimate the amount of solar power produced by Tartu or any other Estonian city present in the dataset given by Estonian Land Board. As a result, author has created a prototype consisting of a processing pipeline that does the analysis of geometry and estimation of solar power, as well as a web app to visualize the results. Considering previous work, there have been similar studies which are either not publicly available, not suitable or outdated. The solution described in this work uses the latest technology and no paid external services. Additionally, it’s designed to work with Estonian data out of the box which was not possible to use with some of the existing tools. Hopefully the developed tool will be further improved and used by local governments to improve the energy efficiency in various cities of Estonia.