[HN Gopher] Revolutionizing solar plant prospection with automat...
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Revolutionizing solar plant prospection with automated viewshed
analysis
Hi HN! This is first blog post ever, discussing one challenge I
encountered working at Inicio. Our company is prospecting suitable
lands for solar power plant using algorithms and geospatial data.
This article will guide you through recent work I've done find
optimal locations that align with visibility constraints. I hope
you find this peek into our solutions insightful!
Author : nadou
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-06-18 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.go-inicio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.go-inicio.com)
| banga wrote:
| Old is new, again.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Great blog post, your English is quite good.
|
| When I was working on my tool for off grid pv hot water
| (www.pvh2o.com), I was was able to get insolation data for USA
| from NREL NSRDB. They claim they have data for the whole planet
| in the DB but I find many spots outside USA do not seem to work.
|
| Where did you get insolation data for Europe?
| nadou wrote:
| We did not use insolation data, only elevation model. I saw a
| HN post a few weeks ago about a solar shade map, the author
| explains quite a few things in it: https://shademap.app/help/
| Retric wrote:
| A major component of solar resource maps data is the impact
| of weather.
|
| Is that part of your model/long term plans or are you
| skipping it for some reason?
| solardev wrote:
| Thanks for the blog post!
|
| At first I thought it was just another solar shade analysis tool
| (which uses GIS to determine how much shading a site will get
| from nearby hills & buildings), but nope, this is actually doing
| the opposite: analyzing whether _other people_ can see your solar
| plant. That 's pretty cool, especially since (as far as I know)
| it's not a common criterion in the US.
|
| Is it a common case in Europe (or France in particular?) where
| this is a big consideration, e.g. "I don't want your solar panels
| uglyfying my landscape"?
|
| -----------
|
| On another note... I wish there were an open-source all-in-one
| solar analysis tool, something that combines this algorithm with
| stuff like Project Sunroof (rooftop shade analysis:
| https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/) and array siting/layout
| (https://www.opensolar.com/). I've thought about doing that for a
| long time now, but it's a lot of work, and I don't have all the
| skills necessary...
|
| Such a tool could be useful to businesses, individuals, and
| governments all over, and would build on existing open-source
| tooling (like GDAL, mentioned in the article, but also frontend
| mapping libs and things like PostGIS).
| fhk wrote:
| yes i made one using a open python lib -
| https://github.com/fusedio/udfs/tree/main/community/fhk/pybd...
| Herz wrote:
| Well, France is the only one in a position to say that it
| doesn't want the panels for aesthetic reasons. They
| decarbonized...
| llsf wrote:
| Really cool! Could be useful to know where to plant trees.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| We're going to be embarrassed of centralized solar in the future.
| Like big liver spots visible from space. Any expansion of energy
| supply is good - but assuming this doesn't detract from more
| effective efforts is naive. Even after making nuclear nearly
| cost-prohibitive with misguided regulation, nuclear is still a
| superior choice in the long run.
| dontreact wrote:
| This is interesting. It seems like sidestepping a problem which
| needs to be attacked head-on: the amount of solar we need to
| build is more than what can be built in invisible areas isn't it?
| Perhaps this helps to get things going for now but can we
| actually build enough in areas with no visibility from
| residential?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| How often do you see farm fields, for example?
|
| We could easily find many many large expanses of land, and
| given the margins on farming, many in my local area are renting
| / selling / building solar farms on the corners or harder-to-
| reach areas of their fields. Since those areas tend to have
| trees around anyway .... But none of that is really a viewshed
| problem unless you've modelled trees.
|
| Now in hillier areas or mountainous regions this gets more
| compliated.
| parpfish wrote:
| My rural community has a solar farm going in, and it is not
| going over well.
|
| Lots of NIMBYs that "did their own research" to conclude that
| solar is _actually_ bad for the environment or uneconomical
| or whatever. But the real reason for their rage is that they
| see it as a physical manifestation of the spread of
| "progressive ideas" and for that reason alone it must be
| stopped
| gumby wrote:
| The amount of land required isn't that high. Nate Lewis at Cal
| Tech once told me that "the amount of light falling on the
| numbered highways of the USA can generate more power than the
| US's entire generating capacity.
|
| Of course he didn't mean that we should cover all the highways;
| it just says we could afford to build and maintain them all and
| have that much land area, so building an equivalent area of
| solar would be both cheaper and feasible.
|
| That was over a decade ago; solar is both cheaper and more
| efficient. IIRC something small like a hundred km2 or so of
| desert would do the trick. We spend much more of that growing
| corn that we wastefully turn into fuel.
| adampwells wrote:
| I work at an ISP that offers fixed wireless Internet.
|
| For marketing purposes I generate viewsheds around each of our
| ~500 towers, so we can get an idea which suburbs to market to.
|
| At the time of sale, my system will calculate the line of site
| from the access point on the tower to the customer rooftop to
| determine the height of the pole (is any) needed to get service.
|
| Like the OP, we re-sampled (gdalwarp, raster2pgsql) some of the
| 15cm lidar data to ~1m to get it down to a manageable size (7TB)
| and run it on a single bare-metal PostgGIS instance (500GB ram,
| 64 cores)
|
| Radio waves at 5GHz are quite 'fat' so we need to allow for that
| on LOS calculations as per [0].
|
| The GIS magic mostly sits in PostGIS and we use a number of data
| sets to solve problems: * Shuttle Radar Topography Mission -
| Digital Elevation Model and Digital Surface Model, 30m grid [1] *
| Building footprints for all of Australia [2] * National Roads [3]
| * property boundaries (cadastre) [4] * All Australian addresses
| [5] * Australian suburbs [6]
|
| For the front end we use a VueJS app (quasar.dev) using DeckGL on
| Google Maps to visualise the LOS path. Back end is Rust
| (axum/sqlx).
|
| GIS is a very interesting are to work in - if I had more fun they
| might start charging me admission to come to work!
|
| [0] https://s.campbellsci.com/documents/au/technical-
| papers/line... [1]
| https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/me...
| [2] https://github.com/microsoft/AustraliaBuildingFootprints [3]
| https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/me...
| [4] https://www.data.qld.gov.au/dataset/cadastral-data-
| queenslan... [5]
| https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/geocoded-national-a...
| [6] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/standards/australian-
| stati...
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