The project is part of a collaboration between Engineers without borders (EWB) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The initial idea was to create an energy baseline for East-Africa.
Stuff that might be useful
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https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/africa-energy-tracker/
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https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-solar-power-tracker/download-data/
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https://www.esmap.org/Updated_Global_Electrification_Platform_GEP_3.0
There are many initiatives to promote renewable energy, both globally and for East-Africa. The Global Solar Atlas (https://globalsolaratlas.info/map) provide easy access to the power potential of photovoltaic power potential.
TZ-SAM is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-4.0). Attribution to TransitionZero is required. You must also clearly indicate if you have made any changes to the TZ-SAM dataset and what these are. Please refer to the suggested citation formats:
Phillpott, M., O’Connor, J., Ferreira, A., Max, S., Kruitwagen, L., & Guzzardi, M. (2024). Solar Asset Mapper: A continuously-updated global inventory of solar energy facilities built with satellite data and machine learning (1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11368204
“TransitionZero Solar Asset Mapper, TransitionZero, May 2024 release.” “TZ-SAM, TransitionZero, May 2024 release.” “TransitionZero (2024) Solar Asset Mapper.”
With this app you can do three different things
- Calculate the PV solar potential for your roof
- Get an overview of solar panels installations at Norwegian roofs
- Get an overview of solar production in Norway (grid exported electricity)
- Search for an address. Lon/lat is stored and used to find irradiation data from PVGIS
- When you locate the address you can draw an area for solar panels on
a roof
- You can switch between Google Earth and ESRI satellite to inspect roofs, and use OSM map as visual guidance
- You can activate the address borders and the property borders from “Matrikkelen”
- I have included pictures from Geonorge for detailed pictures of Norway
- You can have a look at shadows from the mountains - a bit course, but you get the idea
- After drawing area around you roof the area m2 is calculated, then 70% is dedicated PV panels
- The peak power is estimated based on number of estimated panels from 3)
- Looking up peak power and lon/lat in PVGIS –> solar potential
- Choosing “Endre forutsetning” you can disagree with the calculations and change price, kwp, azimuth/orientation, PV angel
PVGIS provides information on solar radiation for any location in the world, except the North and South Poles. They have a API which you can read more about here: https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/photovoltaic-geographical-information-system-pvgis/getting-started-pvgis/api-non-interactive-service_en. API calls have a rate limit of 30 calls/second per IP address, hence 108 000 calls each hour. You can map the solar potential for many locations during a day!
The data is fetched from OpenStreetMap (OSM)
(https://www.openstreetmap.org/). It is a free open geographic
database. The database in maintained by volunteers and open
collaboration. I am using two different methods to collect data,
Overpass Turbo queries and the Rlibrary osmdata. More details in
scripts/solar_installations_OSM.R
[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
// query part for: “amenity=drinking_water”
node["amenity"="drinking_water"]({{bbox}});
way["amenity"="drinking_water"]({{bbox}});
relation["amenity"="drinking_water"]({{bbox}});
);
// print results
out body;
>;
out skel qt;The app is written in R Shiny which is a magical tool that enables
anyone working with data to quickly develop a web application.
Important to note that we are using the PVGIS API. It supports up to 30 queries each second, however, if the service is down, so are we. Hence, we could query lon/lat across Norway and store the irradiation data in our own database to prevent this. Also, this could be compared with our own ground measurements where available. This might similar to the World Bank validation report for the Global Solar Atlas (https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/507341592893487792/global-solar-atlas-2-0-validation-report)
The 3D layer is provided by OSMBuildings https://osmbuildings.org/. We have been in contact with Jan March mail@osmbuildings.org, and after providing details about the Solar analytics app OSMBuildings granted us free use of their data tiles. Thank you!
Elhub recently launched an API with access to production data: https://api.elhub.no/api/energy-data. The solar production is energy delivered to the grid, hence the solar production consumed by the buildings is not included in the statistics.
- Get solar irradiation as a layer in the map? Take a look at the The World Bank and the IFC: https://globalsolaratlas.info/support/about. Solargis is the data provider.
- NSRDB dataset with solar radiation (global horizontal, direct normal, diffuse horizontal) https://nsrdb.nrel.gov/about/what-is-the-nsrdb. The data is available through an API: https://developer.nrel.gov/docs/solar/nsrdb/
Also, have a look at Sengupta et al (2018). Xie, Y., Sengupta, M., 2018. A Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications with Narrowband Irradiances on Tilted surfaces (FARMS-NIT): Part I. The clear-sky model. Sol. Energy 174, 691-702. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2018.09.056.
- Saving picture from a map It would be useful to save the picture from the map where the polygon was drawn. Display it as part of saved roofs https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44259716/how-to-save-a-leaflet-map-in-shiny https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35384258/save-leaflet-map-in-shiny?noredirect=1&lq=1 https://rstudio.github.io/leaflet/shiny.html https://shiny.posit.co/r/gallery/interactive-visualizations/superzip-example/
Google Maps tiles directly in Leaflet might not comply with Google’s Terms of Service…so we should use the API
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57554643/integrating-tiled-wfs-into-r-leaflet-map trafficonese/leaflet.extras#84 https://inbo.github.io/tutorials/tutorials/spatial_wfs_services/
Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls
How to here: https://inbo.github.io/tutorials/tutorials/spatial_wfs_services/
We are using Bing. However, nominatim (open source) works better on free text search addresses Probably consider https://www.kartverket.no/api-og-data/eiendomsdata/brukarrettleiing-adresse-api, which is a SOAP-API directly against the national property register, aka. “matrikkelen”.