Mapping Minnesota’s solar resource

Boston, New York City, Denver, Cambridge and other cities have created solar potential maps to help their residents understand that solar photovoltaic systems are viable in dense urban areas, and to demonstrate the potential that exists on rooftops.

Of course, I had to try this myself.

Minnesota produces LiDAR data, which is basically micro-scale elevation data produced by flying a plane back and forth in a grid and shooting the ground with lasers a bajillion times.  Skilled/obsessive GIS users can clean from this data information that can be used to make a fairly accurate model of everything on the ground (buildings, trees, etc).  GIS software also makes it easy to produce daily, monthly or annual solar insolation maps.  By taking the position of the buildings and trees, knowing the latitude, and projecting how the sun moves across the sky throughout the year, the software calculates a total amount of solar radiation that will hit a point after shading, angle and other factors are taken into account.

Solar insolation in January

Solar insolation in January

After much tinkering, the Kingfield Solar Energy Potential map was born.  The extreme density of the LiDAR data limits how large an area I could process (there were 4.9 million individual data points in this one small section of Minneapolis), but you get the idea.  This map shows the area of each roof that might be appropriate for solar, how many panels could fit in that area, and an estimate of the annual production from those panels.

The Kingfield Solar Map

The Kingfield Solar Map

Some roofs are wholly inappropriate for solar, whether due to tree or building shading, orientation or size.  But there is significant potential.  If solar was installed on every appropriate piece of roof in this one-quarter square mile area, it would produce an estimated 2.2 megawatt hours of electricity each year, and avoid 2.9 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.

6 thoughts on “Mapping Minnesota’s solar resource

    • That’s unclear. Utilities (Xcel) aren’t yet willing to share data on a smaller scale than citywide. You could make an estimate by household, which would probably get you pretty close. I have not bothered to count the households in this map.

    • That’s unclear. Right now utilities (Xcel) are not willing to share consumption data on a scale smaller than citywide. You could make a good estimate by counting households and applying an average, but I haven’t done so.

  1. Pingback: How much energy could Minneapolis get from solar? | Net Density

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