Abstract
The spatio-temporal patterns of the existing rooftop photovoltaic (PV) production can provide valuable insights for the design of effective strategies for PV integration at large scale. In this work, we quantify the hourly production of existing rooftop PV installations by combining two large-scale methods, for detecting rooftop solar panels and for estimating their hourly PV generation, which are both applicable at the Swiss national scale. A validation against measured data of PV installations from 16 roofs in the Swiss Canton of Aargau shows that the existing PV area is detected accurately, while the hourly profiles overestimate the PV production, with higher errors in winter than in summer. These errors result in a mean overestimation of the annual PV production by 16%, assuming a triangular panel placement at low tilt (15°) on flat roofs.
Highlights
Solar photovoltaics (PV) are considered as one of the key technologies in Switzerland’s renewable energy strategy, which aims for an electricity production of 34 TWh by 2050 [1]
We propose an approach for quantifying the hourly production of existing rooftop PV installations, which is scalable to the national level for Switzerland, and validate the results against measurements
Size and location of existing PV installations A qualitative comparison of the PV area detected by the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm and the real area shows that the CNN algorithm performs very well in most cases (8/10 roofs), as shown in Figure 1b and c for roof IDs 10 and 36
Summary
Solar photovoltaics (PV) are considered as one of the key technologies in Switzerland’s renewable energy strategy, which aims for an electricity production of 34 TWh by 2050 [1]. To design effective pathways towards an electricity supply with a high share of PV, we need to identify roofs with a high potential, and assess the spatial and temporal patterns of the electricity production of existing PV capacities. These may indicate (i) socio-economic factors that support PV deployment, (ii) areas with recent growth in PV and (iii) current and potential future challenges of distributed renewable energy generation for the energy system. By combining two methods that are only addressed separately in the literature [4,5], this work can be used to quantify the current PV production at a high spatio-temporal resolution anywhere in Switzerland, whereby the validation results may serve as a basis to quantify the uncertainty related to the hourly PV yield
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