Municipalities have become the leaders in solar technologies deployment. They carry the burden of implementing “solar roofs” programs and projects in the residential sector, making our homes energy-independent and more secure. They lead us in deploying solar technologies to heat and power institutional and commercial buildings.

The municipal solar developments require a comprehensive knowledge base with all information needed for solar planning. The completeness of this knowledge base and the visualization tools used to present and interpret the information, in fact, determine the perspectives, the scale and the efficiency of deployment of solar applications.

Solar energy knowledge base is especially critical for urban environments with various obstructions for solar irradiation to reach collectors. When solar applications are planned at a large scale, it is highly important to maximize energy production from each solar collector. A detailed knowledge of various factors affecting the final solar gain becomes imperative. Being incorporated in decision-support systems and equipped with necessary visualization tools, this knowledge facilitates decision-making in both short term and long term municipal planning.

There is an urgent need in including solar energy component into sustainable municipal planning practices, and Green Power Labs has a solution for municipalities to address the existing information gap in solar deployment. Green Power Labs develops interactive decision support systems for municipal solar applications. Our Solar Energy Suitability Assessment and Applications Planning (SAAP) services are developed as an integral part of the decision support for sustainable energy development in municipal planning. They give municipal planners an advanced tool to evaluate the applicability of solar energy technologies to existing and future buildings.

The Green Power Labs’ Solar Energy SAAP is a unique service. It incorporates georeferenced modeling of urban landscapes based on aerophoto surveys and physical modeling of solar irradiation for solar suitability assessment purposes. The SAAP service provides municipal planners with the information on solar energy resource availability on several levels, taking into consideration natural, technical and socioeconomic limitations for solar projects.


Impact of urban landscape on the performance of solar systems