Numerical Validation of the Radiative Model for the Solar Cadaster Developed for Greater Geneva

Abstract

The achievement of the targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions set by the Paris Agreements and the Swiss federal law on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2 law) requires massive use of renewable energies, which cannot be achieved without their adoption by the general public. The solar cadaster developed as part of the INTERREG G2 Solar project is intended to assess the solar potential of buildings at the scale of Greater Geneva—for both industrial buildings and for individual residential buildings—at a resolution of 1 m. The new version of the solar cadaster is intended to assess the solar potential of roofs, as well as that of vertical facades. The study presented here aims to validate this new version through a comparison with results obtained with two other simulation tools that are widely used and validated by the scientific community. The good accordance with the results obtained with ENVI-met and DIVA-for-Rhino demonstrates the capability of the radiative model developed for the solar cadaster of Greater Geneva to accurately predict the radiation levels of building facades in configurations with randomly distributed buildings (horizontally or vertically).

Principal Component Analysis for the Characterisation of Spatiotemporal Variations of the Solar Resource in Urban Environments

“…Each surface has been discretised into a regular array of points. Similarly to previous studies using the same geometry [6,20], a spatial resolution of t ϕ = 1 m has been adopted here to allow for a reasonable observation of variations in the spatial patterns of the solar resource. Values have been computed for a full year, from 21 st December 2020, 08:30 to 20 th December 2021, 15:00, with a timestep t α = 15 min.…”

Large-scale evaluation of the suitability of buildings for photovoltaic integration: Case study in Greater Geneva

“…In the present work, the data come from the solar cadastre in Greater Geneva. The calculation methods for the radiation are detailed in the work of [8] and were compared with other existing tools in the work of [38]. In what follows we will only provide the main hypothesis and models used in the solar cadastre of Geneva.…”

Towards a Renewable Energy Source Cadastre—A Review of Examples from around the World

“…A detailed GIS analysis of the solar potential of residential roofs was also performed for the cities of Hamburg (Germany) [50], M'diq (Morocco) [51], Komárno (Slovakia) [52] and Zaragoza (Spain) [53]. Total analysis on roofs and facades was carried out in Geneva (Switzerland) [32,54]. For Austria, the photovoltaic potential of rooftops in addition to ground-mounted installations were tested [55].…”