The need for electricity particularly in large cities like New York continues to grow unabated and renewable sources of energy are being increasingly in demand for energy security. Rising to the need of the hour the City University of New York (CUNY) in collaboration with New York City and the federal Department of Energy has announced that 66.4% of the city’s rooftops qualify for solar power harnessing.
The city has a more than a million buildings and altogether the solar panels could generate enough energy (5847 megawatts) to meet nearly half (49.7%) the city’s daytime peak demand for electricity. They also predicted that 14% of the city’s yearly electricity use could be generated using solar panels. Compare this to the meager 6.5 megawatts generated currently from roughly 400 installations in NYC.
CUNY in association with its collaborators have developed an interactive map which can be seen at the website of CUNY. Individuals can now check the suitability of any building in NYC for solar panels, government subsidies to install solar panels and also the exact amount of electricity that can be generated.
The coolest thing about the study is that it used highly precise Lidar technology. An airplane armed with a laser system (Lidar) collected data on a number of variables (shape, angle, size of the rooftops together with the amount of shading from trees and other architecture) which were then analyzed to construct this map.
Solar Power sector is still yet to grow. In USA the installed solar capacity of the entire country is only 2300 megawatts. Solar Energy Industries Association has predicted that solar power might grow into a $12-billion-a-year industry in 2011. In San Francisco, the number of installations have grown more than 3.5 times to 2300 in 2011 compared to 551 in 2007. This map is clearly a step forward in this arena.
The director of sustainability of CUNY said, “This map can serve as a key foundation toward building a new infrastructure, a clean energy infrastructure, for New York City,”.
Via: NYTimes
