Modeling shading with the use of LiDAR for harvesting solar energy in the city of Kingston, Ontario, 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] --- to be understood and tried out by July 7th
(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/)
(iv) the application of shading not just to PV system but also to cooling and heating loaf --> the heat island effect
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
Rae et al (1999): Estimating the uptake of distributed energy in an urban setting
Ayoub, Dignard-Bailey and Fillion (2000): Photovoltaics for buildings: Opportunities for Canada
David et al (2009): Solar Resource Assessment for PV applications