Urban solar energy and solar cadastres

Mapping where solar energy can realistically be produced across a whole city or region, and turning that map into something planners can actually use.

A rooftop is not a solar power plant on its own. Whether it is worth equipping depends on how much sun it receives, how it is oriented, what the building underneath consumes, who owns it, and what the surrounding urban fabric will look like in twenty years.

This work builds solar cadastres — building-by-building assessments of solar potential — at the scale of an entire agglomeration, and asks what they should contain to be useful. The solar cadastre developed for Greater Geneva covers around 265,000 buildings and has been used to support solar governance across a cross-border territory. More recently, convolutional neural networks applied to aerial imagery have been used to detect the photovoltaic systems that already exist, building by building, across French urban and rural territories — because knowing what has been installed is the first step to planning what comes next.