Assessment of potential for photovoltaic roof installations by extraction of roof slope from lidar data and aggregation to census geography

Leading topics in PV research include field performance and grid impact. A national understanding of roof features (slope, orientation, area) is essential for modelling the timing of PV installation scenarios with their associated irradiance data. However, such information is not currently available. This paper demonstrates the extraction of building characteristics from LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data. These characteristics are then aggregated and scaled-up to produce a UK-wide map of PV potential, based on suitable roof tilts and azimuths.