Nation-wide solar scoring
Geospatial prospecting tool spotting large industrial rooftops for solar panel installation, at the scale of Belgium.
Context
Skysun installs solar panels for free on industrial rooftops and earns from the energy produced. Their prospecting therefore targeted large rooftops (> 2,500 m²) of companies in specific business sectors (NACE codes).
They needed a tool to automatically spot these rooftops across the whole of Belgium, municipality by municipality.
What I did
- Extracted from OpenStreetMap with the
osmdatapackage, parallelised by municipality, the rooftops larger than 2,500 m² of industrial type (via OSM tags). - Extracted from the Belgian Crossroads Bank for Enterprises the establishments matching the NACE sectors defined by Skysun.
- Geolocated those establishments with the
phacochRpackage. - Spatial intersection (
sf) between the identified rooftops and the target companies. - Cleaned and wrangled the data with the
tidyverse, delivered as an explorable, filterable table and aleafletmap, with a link to an aerial view of each address.
Outcome
A prospect database, each entry carrying a qualification score that prioritises high-potential rooftops, directly usable by the sales team.
For lack of budget, automatic detection of already-installed panels could not be built in. It still had to be checked manually via the aerial view.