Shading modeling using LIDAR/ GIS for harvesting solar energy in the city of Kingston, ON, Canada

Levinson and Gupta (2008): Estimating solar access of typical residential rooftops: A case study in San Jose, CA presents a complete guidance for estimating the shadows cast by tress and buildings on rooftop PV systems. The process encompasses processing LiDAR data to get surface and ground elevation model (DSM and DEM), extracting urban land use classes, applying irradiation models on the features and modeling the shadows with time. If anything, this should be the core paper for the thesis. However a few modifications/ additions are forthcoming:

(i) a parallel workflow between indistrial use ArcGIS and open source GRASS LiDAR tools. The extraction of roof/ trees and calculation of their heights are further detailed in Kessner et al: Analysis of the solar potential of roofs by using official LiDAR data, Jochem et al: Automatic Roof Plane Detection and Analysis in Airborne Lidar Point Clouds for Solar Potential Assessment, Clayton Crawford's tutorial and [1].

(ii) recommended usage of the Perez et al model over the HDKR model to calculate the ration between irradiance on inclined planes to that on horizontal surfaces(with suggestions and codes from Rob and Amir (Ma and Iqbal (1983): Statistical comparison of models for estimating solar radiation on inclined surfaces, Feuermann and Zemel (1992): Validation of models for global irradiance on inclined planes, Remund et al (2003): Chain of algorithms to calculate advanced solar parameters and Duffie & Beckman (1991))

(iii) an overview of different softwares for modeling shading and solar feature (roof) extraction. the two candidates are CH2M Hill's Solar Automated Feature Extraction and the open source Radiance version 4.0 (http://www.radiance-online.org/)

Levinson et al (2009): Solar access of residential rooftops in four California cities

Robinson (2006): Urban morphology and indicators of radiation availability

Compagnon (2004): Solar and daylight availability in the urban fabric

Ruther et al (2004): Potential of building integrated photovoltaics solar energy generators in assisting daytime peaking feeders in urban areas in Brazil

Castro et al (2004): Grid-connected PV buildings: analysis of future scenarios with an example of Southern Spain

Rae et al (1999): Estimating the uptake of distributed energy in an urban setting

Denholm and Margolis (2008): Land use requirements and the per capita solar footprint for PV generation in the US

Levinson and Gupta (2008): Estimating solar access of typical residential rooftops: A case study in San Jose, CA

Ayoub, Dignard-Bailey and Fillion (2000): Photovoltaics for buildings: Opportunities for Canada

Pelland and Poisson (2008): An Evaluation of the Potential of Building Integrated Photovoltaics in Canada

Suzuki, Ito and Kurosawa (2007): An analysis of PV resource in residential areas by means of aerial photo images

David et al (2009): Solar Resource Assessment for PV applications

Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.