Site Assessment and Layout Optimization for Rooftop Solar Energy Generation in Worldview-3 Imagery

TL;DR

This paper presents a fully automated, flexible layout optimization pipeline for rooftop solar panels using satellite imagery and MINLP, emphasizing the importance of shading considerations for maximizing energy potential.

Contribution

It introduces a novel automated layout design method that accounts for shading and geometric flexibility, surpassing previous heuristic-based approaches.

Findings

Shading significantly impacts optimal panel layouts.

Heuristics may be inadequate due to geometric and shading complexities.

A new rule of thumb is proposed to improve shading-aware layout optimization.

Abstract

With the growth of residential rooftop PV adoption in recent decades, the problem of effective layout design has become increasingly important in recent years. Although a number of automated methods have been introduced, these tend to rely on simplifying assumptions and heuristics to improve computational tractability. We demonstrate a fully automated layout design pipeline that attempts to solve a more general formulation with greater geometric flexibility that accounts for shading losses. Our approach generates rooftop areas from satellite imagery and uses MINLP optimization to select panel positions, azimuth angles and tilt angles on an individual basis rather than imposing any predefined layouts. Our results demonstrate that shading plays a critical role in automated rooftop PV optimization and significantly changes the resulting layouts. Additionally, they suggest that, although several common heuristics are often effective, they may not be universally suitable due to complications resulting from geometric restrictions and shading losses. Finally, we evaluate a few specific heuristics from the literature and propose a potential new rule of thumb that may help improve rooftop solar energy potential when shading effects are considered.