Assessment Of Solar Energy Utilization Potential On Building Rooftop

Collecting solar energy from building rooftop to replace traditional energy is an effective way to alleviate urban energy pressure.Assessment of solar energy utilization potential on building rooftop in large scale is of great significance for promoting the development and utilization of urban solar energy.There are mainly two challenges when assessing the potential of solar energy utilization in a large scale: Firstly,a fine estimation of solar energy resources potential in a large-scale requires an efficient and reasonable calculation plan;Secondly,evaluating the potential of solar energy utilization on building rooftops requires a comprehensive consideration of the spatial distribution of solar radiation and building rooftops and the impact of building rooftop type on solar energy utilization.In this study,by taking downtown Shanghai as an example,the CUDA parallel computing platform and grid scheme with buffer was combined with the Digital Surface Model(DSM)to quickly estimate the amount of solar radiation in urban area.And a four-quadrant based segmentation method was proposed to recognize the rooftop type for better design the utilization of solar energy equipment and estimate the cost of solar energy utilization.Finally,based on two common solar energy utilization systems: photovoltaic systems and photothermal systems,two scenarios are set to simulate the solar energy utilization potential on building rooftops.Mainly important conclusions are as follows:(1)This study used the SHORTWAVE-C model to estimate the potential of solar energy resources.Based on the high-resolution DSM data generated by stereo image pair,combined with the CUDA computing platform and grid scheme with buffer,the computational efficiency of fine estimation of the solar energy potential in large-scale is successfully improved by 30%,and solved the problem of solar radiation at the boundary is affected by adjacent features when using gridding scheme to calculate.(2)A four-quadrant based segmentation was proposed to identify the rooftop type(horizon and slope),which can quickly complete the rooftop type recognition task in large scale.The accuracy reached 84% while using four-quadrant based segmentation to recognize rooftop type.The type of rooftop identified by this method provides the basis for the design of solar energy equipment installation plan and cost-benefits estimation.(3)Based on the estimation of solar energy potential and building rooftop data,this study simulate two solar utilization scenarios and evaluates solar energy utilization potential on building rooftops.The estimation results showed that the evaluation scheme can accurately find rooftops that are not suitable for installing solar energy equipment,and can obtain the economic and environmental benefits of each building rooftop according to the installation cost-benefits calculation method.The results of this study can provide decision support for government to carry out the urban new energy development planning.The proposed framework for assessing solar energy utilization potential in large-scale cities has made both scientific and practical significance.