PublicationJournal Article Rooftop solar photovoltaic potential in cities: how scalable are assessment approaches?

Published:
December 22, 2017
Publication Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:

Dis­trib­uted pho­to­voltaics (PV) have played a crit­i­cal role in the deploy­ment of solar energy, cur­rently mak­ing up roughly half of the global PV installed capac­ity. How­ever, there remains sig­nif­i­cant unused eco­nom­i­cally ben­e­fi­cial poten­tial. Esti­mates of the total tech­ni­cal poten­tial for rooftop PV sys­tems in the United States cal­cu­late a gen­er­a­tion com­pa­ra­ble to approx­i­mately 40% of the 2016 total national electric-​​sector sales. To best take advan­tage of the rooftop PV poten­tial, effec­tive ana­lytic tools that sup­port deploy­ment strate­gies and aggres­sive local, state, and national poli­cies to reduce the soft cost of solar energy are vital. A key step is the low-​​cost automa­tion of data analy­sis and busi­ness case pre­sen­ta­tion for structure-​​integrated solar energy. In this paper, the scal­a­bil­ity and res­o­lu­tion of var­i­ous meth­ods to assess the urban rooftop PV poten­tial are com­pared, con­clud­ing with sug­ges­tions for future work in bridg­ing method­olo­gies to bet­ter assist pol­icy makers.

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