HN Explorer

Revolutionizing solar plant prospection with automated viewshed analysis (go-inicio.com)

65 points by nadou ↗ HN
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!

31 comments

[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[dead] jeffbee
[flagged]
opwieurposiu
Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the town square of a charming 1000 year old French village. You see cobblestones yes, but do you see any solar panels?

Putting the panels in a less visible area is a smart move to avoid conflict with the neighbors. In places with a lot of land like west USA it probably does not matter so much.

solardev
We have our share of NIMBYs in the Western USA too, though it's more often about wind farms (large and noisy). Our solar farms tend to be out in the sparsely-inhabited deserts anyway, where not a lot of people live. But then we have to evaluate for endangered species and tribal burial grounds and coordinate across several layers of government and different funding & tax rebate sources. It's not easy to actually build a facility...
nadou
That's the main difference with France indeed! We have strong regulations over landuse that allows you to build infrastructure over constructible areas (often located around city center). For this type of large-scale projects you will need to go deeper the countryside but we don't have much desert areas here. You'll always end-up close to housing area or historical monuments.
jeffbee
That sounds like b**** to me. There's a parking lot right in the middle of Saint-Bonnet-le-Château.
ben_w
I would be perfectly content to put PV on rooftops in a place like that, or let others do so, if I lived there.

I own an apartment in the UK, and inquired about putting PV on the roof. There were two reasons why the answer was "no": (1) leasehold, (2) conservation area.

Theoretically, the neighbours who installed satellite dishes (tiny ones!) were in violation of the latter, though in practice nobody seemed to care.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
banga
Old is new, again.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
opwieurposiu
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
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
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?

superturkey650
This is for how visible the solar panels are to people, not for how much sun they will get.
gumby
The NREL data implicitly control for that
solardev
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).

Herz
Well, France is the only one in a position to say that it doesn't want the panels for aesthetic reasons. They decarbonized...
llsf
Really cool! Could be useful to know where to plant trees.
cupcakecommons
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
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
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
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
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.

vlovich123
I think only if you ignore distribution and overall grid integration which would constrain where you can place solar plants and ignore that in the winter you’re not going to get much power production from the North East and PNW regions (and when you do it’s super spotty).

By that logic of ignoring constraints, nuclear takes 0 land area compared to solar and could generate more power than solar panels we’d ever produce.

gumby
Were you replying to my note? The point, as I noted, is not to say "just stick them where the roads are" but rather as a sort of Fermi estimate -- the cost of deployment is demonstrably quite feasible. Whether people want to do it or not is unrelated.

FWIW there are a lot of deserts and plains that can be used for year round generation.

vlovich123
My point is that the fermi approximation is flawed because HVDC is still extremely expensive to transmit power from places where solar is plentiful to where it’s needed. So there are significant real world implications that make the approximation off probably by an order of magnitude. There’s a lot of solar energy but effectively time and distance shifting it turns out to be extremely difficult and expensive. That’s why solar and wind continue struggling to replace fossil fuels in the grid (modulo places like California, Florida and Texas with abundant sunshine throughout the state) despite the generators themselves being cheaper than ever; all they’ve managed to do is absorb daytime energy growth. It’s something but our absolute fossil fuel consumption in the grid has continued to grow substantially even if as a percentage it managed to stagnate or marginally decrease. Nuclear continues to have far more success at actually replacing fossil fuels in the grid, has meaningfully less land footprint than solar, and while gen iii reactors require some work to maintain safety, it still remains remarkably safe per mwh comparable to solar and gen iv reactors have fail safe designs that don’t carry any of the same maintenance concerns. We gave up on nuclear fission too early and easily due to FUD from the coal industry and it still remains the better path to fix the grid’s contribution to global warming.
specialist
Yes and: IIRC, just 1/4 of the space devoted to golf courses.
dontreact
I guess my question is:

Does this work address a specious, disingenuous argument that is being put forth by NIMBYs to block solar installation, so does it address a real pain point?

I agree we should be able to build enough solar but does this work address a real bottleneck or a fake problem presented as real by people with ulterior motives?

adampwells
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...