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
- Create a web site with a map of Benton county, Oregon
- Allow owners of solar installations to enter data about their sites.
- Put the sites on the map.
- Allow reports based on areas, for example, total power generated in Corvallis.
Phase 2
- Process Benton county LiDAR to identify roof tops.
- Determine which ones are not shaded (by geographic features or bad slope)
- Measure how many panels might fit.
- Create a database of the results
- Join the results with parcels to tie measurements to sites.
- 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.
