Solar Potential Analysis of Rooftops Using Satellite Imagery
This addresses the lack of awareness about solar potential among building owners, particularly in India, by offering a tool to estimate feasibility and reduce perceived costs, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to new data.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing rooftop solar potential by developing an approach that generates reports remotely using only latitude and longitude, providing approximate usable area and visual analysis for panel placement to maximize output.
Solar energy is one of the most important sources of renewable energy and the cleanest form of energy. In India, where solar energy could produce power around trillion kilowatt-hours in a year, our country is only able to produce power of around in gigawatts only. Many people are not aware of the solar potential of their rooftop, and hence they always think that installing solar panels is very much expensive. In this work, we introduce an approach through which we can generate a report remotely that provides the amount of solar potential of a building using only its latitude and longitude. We further evaluated various types of rooftops to make our solution more robust. We also provide an approximate area of rooftop that can be used for solar panels placement and a visual analysis of how solar panels can be placed to maximize the output of solar power at a location.