Earth Observation based energy infrastructures to support GIS-like energy system models

Abstract

Due to increasing worldwide urbanization, increase of urban residents energy demand, decreasing photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal module prices the number of operating plants has increase significantly in recent years. Authorities and electricity grid operators support solar power plants installations in order to achieve the Federal Government’s strategies for reducing CO2 emissions and primary energy consumption by 80% until 2050. For load modelling, generation of demand and production statistics as well as infrastructure design they need up-to-date roof usage and coverage information plus solar plant location data. Many of these systems are not exactly registered and publicly available databases of solar modules are not up to date. Monitoring strategies of solar plants are interesting for energy forecasting models in research, urban planning and industry. Currently, energy forecasting models are often based on community-based OpenStreetMap data (e.g. Alhamwi et al. 2018). However, these are partly faulty, have insufficient detailed information or have very different regional accuracy. Therefore, we start to collect energy-specific data with Earth observation techniques. Questions of energy system analysis are, for example, the modelling of load profiles in the electricity system. We focus on energy load quantification in urban areas such as buildings and renewable energy sources detection, photovoltaics and solar thermal energy devices from flight and satellite data.