Solar energy potential mapping at a building scale

The sheltering from nearby buildings may have great impact on the actual solar radiation energy received by a building in urban areas, and the resultant solar energy radiation reached the building roof and facets may be very different from the regional scale estimation result. To combine the quantitative inversion of remotely sensed data and GIS 3-D analysis techniques to build a new model for calculating and assessing building-scale solar energy potential. A building community in Urumqi City, Xinjiang is selected as the study area and used to test the proposed model. The result shows that the approach and model proposed in this study can provide an effective and valuable tool for solar energy estimation and energy-wise planning on a building scale.