SOLAR IRRADIATION AND ENERGY POTENTIAL IN RALEIGH

BY RAHUL BHOSLE rbhosle GIS582-001

Introduction In todays world we need saving the planet is an issue of utmost importance. One way of doing so is using the energy received from the sun to generate electricity. Solar radiation is the visible and the near visible spectrum emitted from the sun. The solar radiation needs to be converted to electricity with the help of solar panels. This paper is aimed at showing the areas which will receive an adequate amount of solar energy all over the year. These areas can be roof tops (most desirable) or open spaces. Roof tops of tall buildings will be the most desirable as the solar panels will be open to the sky without any shadows being casted on them.

Study Site I chose City of Raleigh, North Carolina as my area of study. As I am a Graduate student at NCSU I thought it would be interesting to see the areas close by that can have solar panels installed. Also, Raleigh has many high and low areas of elevation, so I will get results that will have a wide variety of solar exposure. The location coordinates of this city is 35 degrees 49 minutes and 8 seconds North ; 78 degrees 48 minutes 31 seconds West. This city has many water bodies which do not return any LIDAR points. Also, the downtown has very tall buildings which show a good example of where the solar panels can be installed to generate electricity for at least the building on which they are installed.

Data 1) LIDAR dataI used the LIDAR point cloud data from the Center For Lidar Information Coordination and Knowledge website. This website is an USGS website. The bundle that I downloaded was for Raleigh, although I could not specify Raleigh in there, I had to clip it later on the Raleigh city boundary. The LIDAR data in this website is available for every region in USA. I downloaded the LIDAR data bundles which were in the .LAS format. The LAS format is a public binary format which is used most commonly. The coordinate system for this data was in NAD83_US_HARN_NORTH_CAROLINA_FIPS_3200 (FEET). This data was taken in 2001, thus there is no ASPRS classification done on them. This data was at 10 meter resolution. This Website - http://lidar.cr.usgs.gov/ 2) Shapefile dataThe shapefiles that I got for the City of Raleigh were from the Wake county GIS website. The data is available free of cost like the previous data. This data was vector format and was in the

NAD83_US_NORTH_CAROLINA_FIPS_3200 (FEET). I had to later project this data in the coordinate system used for the LIDAR data. The difference in the two coordinate systems was just a few centimeters. This website is hosted by the local government agency for the Wake county. a) Wake_Townships_year_mo.zip This is the zip file which contains the boundary shapefile for Wake County. b) Raleigh_Buildings_year.zip This zipfile contains the buildings shapefile of Raleigh. c) Raleigh_Roads_year.zip This zipfile contains the roads shapefile in Raleigh. All this shapefile data was last updated in the year 2010. Website - http://www.wakegov.com/gis/services/data.htm 3) BasemapI used the Bing Aerial Base Map to get a perspective of where the buildings are located and if I am on the right track or not.

Methods The solar radiation that is emitted from the sun is not always directly received. The total solar radiation is the sum of the direct radiation, the diffused radiation and the reflected radiation. The image shows that the direct radiation is the one which is directly incident on the surface. The diffused radiation is the one which is diffused from the clouds and other atmospheric conditions like turbidity onto the surface of the earth. Lastly, the reflected radiation is the one which is reflected off the topography of the earth. The sum of all three have to considered as the incident solar radiation. The factors that affect the solar radiation are the topography, atmospheric properties, land cover and the solar incidence angle. The topography is the slope, aspect and the shadows that need to be taken into consideration. The shadows are a big factor that needs to be considered. There are two shadows, one is the cast shadow which is what buildings and other big structures cast on the road. The other is shadow which is cast by the structure itself. The self shadow is the one in which the structure has one side not in the direction if the suns rays and thus there is no sunlight incident on it. The atmospheric properties would be the cloud cover which plays a big role in diffusing the sunlight, atmospheric turbidity to which constitutes the pollution in the air. Finally, the solar incidence angle, the angle of incidence is the angle between the sun's rays irradiated on a surface and the line normal to this surface. The position of the sun is required to calculate the solar beam radiation. The components required to calculate the position of the sun are the Azimuth, the Altitude, Declination, Sunrise and sunset times and the day of the year. The declination is the angle between the earth sun line and the equatorial plane. The sun rise and the sunset times are required for that particular year.

To calculate the solar beam radiation we also need the solar constant which is in Watt per square meters. I used the .LAS format LIDAR data. I had to first convert this data to point data to see the points. The LIDAR data has a point spacing which is the determining factor in how to handle the data. I found that the average point spacing between the points that were collected was 13.277 feet. The point cloud was multi return LIDAR data. I used all the returns so that I got to see all the features. The trees, buildings and open spaces. Once I got the point data I could now use it to get raster data of the city. But, first it had to be clipped down to the Raleigh boundary limits. The Raleigh boundary limits data had to be projected in the coordinate system of the LIDAR data. This data needed to be interpolated so that there are no null values/empty cells. I used the Inverse Distance Weighting method to do the interpolation. The IDW is a method for multivariate interpolation, a process of assigning values to unknown points by using values usually scattered set of unknown points. Here, the value at the unknown point is a weighted sum of the values of N known points. The number of points that I used was the default, 12 neighboring points. The power that I used was 2. There were other methods of interpolation like Krigging and Spline. But, the IDW was a clear winner. This is because the average point spacing is so small that there would be a lot of neighbors around each unknown point. Also in the interpolation the resolution to be specified was 10. The solar radiation output is Watt hours per square meter. The latitude which is an input to calculate the solar radiation has to be of one point. As in, the city can have different location coordinates but the tool is usually designed for local landscape scales. I calculated the solar radiation for the Summer solstice and the Winter solstice for 2012. One can also calculate the solar radiation for the full year as an average or with a monthly interval. Results The image in figure one shows the study area which I worked on. This is the city of Raleigh, North Carolina. The red boundary marks the boundary of the city. This boundary was got from the Wake townships shapefile in which Raleigh is one of the attributes. The background is the Aerial imagery of North Carolina. The figure two shows the LIDAR point cloud data after being converted to multipoint data. This data was later on clipped to the Raleigh boundary. The average point spacing that I used was 13.277. I got this value after getting point file information of the .LAS data. The figure three shows the interpolation output for the LIDAR data. The input for the IDW interpolation tool that I used was the LIDAR point data from the above image. I used the resolution of 10 meters. The output which I got was very clear, it shows the buildings, trees, open areas and roads. Now, for my research I would be needing only the Open space and the buildings because those are the areas that are suitable for placing the solar panels.

The figure four shows the zoomed in image of downtown Raleigh. I am using the downtown Raleigh as an example to show the outputs that I got. In downtown Raleigh there some tall buildings whose roof tops are suitable for installing solar panels. Also, these tall buildings cast some shadow on the ground and neighboring smaller buildings. Figure 5 shows the solar radiation on Summer solstice for the year 2012. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year. On this day the highest solar radiation recorded was at 5986.06 Watt hour per square meter. The lowest value was at 5.14 Watt hour per square meter. The highest value is the orange color areas and the low values are the blue colored ones. As a whole one can see that Raleigh was on an average pretty hot during the summer and most of the areas received a lot of solar radiation (characterized by the orange and yellow colored areas.) Figure six shows the zoomed in image of the downtown Raleigh, in this image you can see that on the summer solstice there are some areas near the tall buildings on which shadow is casted by the tall buildings. This output was an average of the solar radiation output taken and every half hour interval, so the shadowed areas on an average do not receive enough sunshine over the whole day on Summer solstice. Figure seven shows the solar radiation on the Winter solstice 2012. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year. There is a vast difference between this image and the output of the summer solstice. The high is 2005.03 Watt hours per sq.mtr., the low is 1.59 Watt hour per sq.mtr. This shows that the high on Summer solstice is twice more than the high on the winter solstice. The northwest region of Raleigh had many low values, thus looking at the image one could tell that the middle region and the south are most preferable to install solar planets. Figure eight shows a zoomed in image of the solar radiation on Winter solstice. This shows that there are many more low values on Winter solstice than summer solstice. The image in figure nine shows the difference between the output from the summer solstice and the output from the winter solstice. The dark orange to red areas are the areas that receive a good amount of sunlight all around the year, these areas are in the middle, south and along the north east region of the beltline.

Figure 1: Study Area - City of Raleigh, NC.

Figure 2: LIDAR point data for Raleigh

Figure 3: IDW interpolation of Raleigh LIDAr data.

Figure 4: Zoomed in image of downtown Raleig h

Figure 5: Solar radiation on summer solstice 2012 in Raleigh.

Figure 6: Zoomed in image of Downtown Raleigh on Summer solstice 2012.

Figure 7: Solar radiation on winter solstice 2012 in Raleigh.

Figure 8: Zoomed in image of Downtown Raleigh on Winter solstice 2012.

Figure 9: The areas that do not have much change in solar radiation over the whole year. Conclusions The solar panels can be fit in many places in Raleigh. In my findings I have made a generalization of the most suitable areas in the city. There are buildings and open spaces, if you see more closely, that do receive a good amount of sunlight in Northwest Raleigh. But, the best areas would be South and the center of Raleigh where downtown Raleigh is. To get a more clear result one would require data which is taken at a resolution of approximately one meter. The LIDAR data that I used was from the year 2001 and the shapefile data was 2010 data, so there were a few buildings that were there in the building footprints shapefile but were not there in the raster created from the LIDAR data. Reference 1) Morphology- based Building Detection from Airborne Lidar Data http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~lewang/pdf/lewang_sample28.pdf 2) Fu, P. 2000. A Geometric Solar Radiation Model with Applications in Landscape
Ecology. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Geography, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA.

3) Fu, P., and P. M. Rich. 2000. The Solar Analyst 1.0 Manual. Helios Environmental
Modeling Institute (HEMI), USA.

4) Rich, P. M., R. Dubayah, W. A. Hetrick, and S. C. Saving. 1994. "Using Viewshed

Models to Calculate Intercepted Solar Radiation: Applications in Ecology. American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Technical Papers, 524529

5) Solar Angles - http://personal.cityu.edu.hk/~bsapplec/solar1.htm 6) Lectures for GIS 582, NCSU DR. Helena Mitasova 7) Open source GIS a GRASS GIS Approach Markus Neteler and Helena Mitasova