Solar map

Overview

This is about building a solar map for Benton county.

I got the idea after seeing an article in ArcNews about the San Francisco and Los Angeles solar maps.

Status

I just cooked up this idea ten minutes ago. Brian Wilson 17:39, 1 January 2012 (MST)

Phase 1

1. Create a web site with a dynamic browseable map of Benton county, Oregon
2. Allow owners of solar installations to enter data about their sites.
3. Put the sites on the map.
4. Allow reports based on areas, for example, total power generated in Corvallis.

Phase 2

1. Process Benton county LiDAR to identify roof tops.
2. Determine which ones are not shaded (by geographic features or bad slope)
3. Measure how many panels might fit.
4. Create a database of the results
5. Join the results with parcels to tie measurements to sites.
6. Enhance the web site to allow searching the database by address,

Software

Everything for me is about PostGIS and Geoserver right now, this whole project is a proof-of-concept, learning experiment for me. In fact the only reason I started this page was to make a list of what I might want to import into PostGIS since that's about all I know how to do with it today.

Data

I don't think I have scaling issues, so I don't mind hosting the entire map. Otherwise I'd consider putting it on top of a Google map.

Map layers

I have access already to lots of Benton county data, will probably use that.

• roads
• railroads

• building foot prints
• taxlots
• addresses
• parks, city and county

• Natural features including

• elevations, probably in the form of hillshade
• might want to show shading on the map for phase 2
• aerial photos

I wonder if I want to include zoning information? What else?

Non-spatial data

The database of user accounts and the information they have submitted will be stored in PostgreSQL tables.

User accounts will include a list of properties using the taxlot id as the foreign key.