An Automated Approach to Facilitate Rooftop Solar PV Installation in Smart Cities: A Comparative Study Between Bhopal, India and Trondheim, Norway

The Indian Smart city concept thrives on providing assured electricity while maintaining the livability of a city. Since rooftop solar PV can contribute to 24 x 7 supply of electricity to cities while keeping the air pollution at bay, it plays an important role in Smart City planning. The main advantage of rooftop solar PV is that it can be installed on roof areas of buildings thus minimizing the distribution loss. This chapter proposes an automated method to extract available roof area for rooftop solar PV panel installation. The available roof area was then used to estimate the solar energy potential of a city. Saha and Mandal (Curr Urban Stud 4:356-375, 2016) has already devised an automated method to extract urban roof areas of Bhopal city using object-oriented classification approach. For the purpose of the study, a neighborhood, namely, Minaal residency was selected, roof area of which was extracted using the above-mentioned method. The same was applied to extract residential roofs of Trondheim city of Norway which is also a potential Smart City. Several adjustmentswere needed since the urban roofs ofTrondheim city are different from the roofs ofBhopal city. To assess the accuracy of the automated method, a visual comparison was performed between the automatically and manually extracted roof areas. The visual comparison was followed by a statistical comparison for further confirmation. The extracted roof area was then used to estimate the solar energy potential of Trondheim city through rooftop solar PV.