Towards Scalable Economic Photovoltaic Potential Analysis Using Aerial Images and Deep Learning

Roof-mounted photovoltaic systems play a critical role in the global transition to renewable energy generation. An analysis of roof photovoltaic potential is an important tool for supporting decision-making and for accelerating new installations. State of the art uses 3D data to conduct potential analyses with high spatial resolution, limiting the study area to places with available 3D data. Recent advances in deep learning allow the required roof information from aerial images to be extracted. Furthermore, most publications consider the technical photovoltaic potential, and only a few publications determine the photovoltaic economic potential. Therefore, this paper extends state of the art by proposing and applying a methodology for scalable economic photovoltaic potential analysis using aerial images and deep learning. Two convolutional neural networks are trained for semantic segmentation of roof segments and superstructures and achieve an Intersection over Union values of 0.84 and 0.64, respectively. We calculated the internal rate of return of each roof segment for 71 buildings in a small study area. A comparison of this paper’s methodology with a 3D-based analysis discusses its benefits and disadvantages. The proposed methodology uses only publicly available data and is potentially scalable to the global level. However, this poses a variety of research challenges and opportunities, which are summarized with a focus on the application of deep learning, economic photovoltaic potential analysis, and energy system analysis.