Open LiDAR workflow for rooftop solar potential in Kamloops

This ongoing project develops a transferable geospatial workflow for estimating rooftop solar photovoltaic potential from openly available LiDAR point clouds and meteorological data.

Tyler Goncalves applied the workflow to Kamloops, British Columbia, a sunny Southern Interior municipality where distributed rooftop solar could contribute to electrification and clean-energy planning.

The workflow normalizes classified LiDAR point clouds, identifies likely building footprints, builds city-surface rasters, simulates annual solar irradiation with UMEP's Solar Energy on Building Envelopes model, and filters rooftop surfaces by size, slope, aspect, and annual irradiance.

The Kamloops case study identified 6,277,392 square metres of suitable rooftop area after suitability filtering, receiving an estimated 6,993 GWh of annual solar insolation. Using a 20 percent module-efficiency assumption and the PVWatts standard 14 percent system-loss factor, the report estimated an upper-bound electricity potential of roughly 1,174 GWh per year before accounting for detailed module fitting and configuration constraints.

The project emphasizes open, transferable methods that can be adapted to other British Columbia municipalities as provincial LiDAR coverage expands.

Status

• Ongoing MGEM project

People And Roles

• Tyler Goncalves: MGEM intern and project lead
• Naoko Ellis: co-supervisor, UBC Chemical and Biological Engineering
• Connor McGookin: co-supervisor, UBC Chemical and Biological Engineering
• Gregory Paradis: collaborator

Collaborators And Partners

• UBC Master of Geomatics for Environmental Management program
• UBC Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

Outputs

• MGEM final report
• Open-source rooftop solar resource assessment workflow
• Kamloops building-footprint, solar-insolation, and rooftop-suitability case-study outputs
• Future workflow direction for province-wide rooftop solar assessment

References And Downloads

Goncalves, T. Open-source LiDAR workflow for rooftop solar photovoltaic resource assessment in Kamloops, British Columbia. MGEM final report, University of British Columbia.