Lethbridge Solar Radiation Analysis

A term project by Everett Blakley, Nicole Byford, and Sam Gerrand for GEOG4740 at the University of Lethbridge.

To see the scripts and workflow used for this project, check out the scripts/ directory of this repo

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Introduction

Solar power costs have dropped 90% over the last decade
Building new renewables is now cheaper than operating existing fossil power plants
Lethbridge, AB receives ~320 sunshine days annually
Houses receive different amounts of insolation depending on their location, rooftop slope/aspect, shading by trees/buildings etc.

For this project, we had 3 major objectives:

Quantify the annual photovoltaic (PV) potential (kWh) of each residential building in Lethbridge, AB.
Based on the PV potential and average cost of energy, calculate the profitability of a PV system over a standard PV system lifetime (25 years).
Create a user-friendly web-based interface to display this information to homeowners in the City of Lethbridge.

LiDAR data from the City of Lethbridge
Building Footprint shapefile
Land Parcels shapefile
Solar panel data, including panel efficiency (r), performance ratio (PR), and cost