Deep Learning Method for Evaluating Photovoltaic Potential of Rural Land Use Types

Rooftop photovoltaic (PV) power generation uses building roofs to generate electricity by laying PV panels. Rural rooftops are less shaded and have a regular shape, which is favorable for laying PV panels. However, because of the relative lack of information on buildings in rural areas, there are fewer methods to assess the utilization potential of PV on rural buildings, and most studies focus on urban buildings. In addition, in rural areas, concentrated ground-mounted PV plants can be built on wastelands, hillsides, and farmlands. To facilitate the overall planning and synergistic layout of rural PV utilization, we propose a new workflow to identify different types of surfaces (including building roofs, wastelands, water surfaces, etc.) by applying a deep learning approach to count the PV potential of different surfaces in rural areas. This method can be used to estimate the spatial distribution of rural PV development potential from publicly available satellite images. In this paper, 10 km(2) of land in Wuhan is used as an example. The results show that the total PV potential in the study area could reach 198.02 GWh/year, including 4.69 GWh/year for BIPV, 159.91 GWh/year for FSPV, and 33.43 GWh/year for LSPV. Considering the development cost of different land types, several timespans (such as short-, medium-, and long-term) of PV development plans for rural areas can be considered. The method and results provide tools and data for the assessment of PV potential in rural areas and can be used as a reference for the development of village master plans and PV development plans.