Site Assessment and Layout Optimization for Rooftop Solar Energy Generation in Worldview-3 Imagery
Name
remotesensing-15-01356.pdf
Size
5 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f71ff2aeff644c940d3cd0e3d1015689
Author(s)
Awwad, Zeyad
Alharbi, Abdulaziz
Habib, Abdulelah H.
de Weck, Olivier L.
Date Issued
February 28, 2023
Publisher
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Citation
Remote Sensing 15 (5): 1356 (2023)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
With the growth of residential rooftop PV adoption in recent decades, the problem of effective layout design has become increasingly important in recent years. Although a number of automated methods have been introduced, these tend to rely on simplifying assumptions and heuristics to improve computational tractability. We demonstrate a fully automated layout design pipeline that attempts to solve a more general formulation with greater geometric flexibility that accounts for shading losses. Our approach generates rooftop areas from satellite imagery and uses MINLP optimization to select panel positions, azimuth angles and tilt angles on an individual basis rather than imposing any predefined layouts. Our results demonstrate that shading plays a critical role in automated rooftop PV optimization and significantly changes the resulting layouts. Additionally, they suggest that, although several common heuristics are often effective, they may not be universally suitable due to complications resulting from geometric restrictions and shading losses. Finally, we evaluate a few specific heuristics from the literature and propose a potential new rule of thumb that may help improve rooftop solar energy potential when shading effects are considered.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15051356
