The High-Resolution Solar Mapping at Urban Scale pilot provides a solar resource assessment and mapping at the urban scale (metric and sub metric), which it is crucial for the developments of PV and solar thermal systems in urban areas. This very high-resolution solar resource assessment and mapping require:
- High-quality long-term and high temporal resolution (1-min) solar resource dataset
- High-quality and high spatial resolution (sub-metric) 3D description of the complex geometry of the urban areas for the shadow (and potentially the multi-refractive effects).
The main bottleneck of the high spatial resolution solar resource processing at urban scale resides in the handling of the huge amount of sub-metric 3D data to process the corresponding local shadow masks for each sub-metric pixel of the solar maps. This local shadow mask is then applied to the high temporal corresponding solar datasets before its multi-annual averaging to provide multi-annual averages of monthly and yearly irradiations. A possible solution would be to resort to cloud computing for the shadow masks determination and the corresponding solar processing on dedicated parallel servers located as close as possible to 3D data sources, to prevent to transmit through the network, this huge amount of information.
The concept of cloud computing supporting the NexGEOSS infrastructure may help in solving this issue in both computational aspects and dissemination aspects.