Solar energy potential assessment: An overview and a fast modeling approach with application to Italy

The exponential growth of photovoltaic installations in several countries represents a strong motivation for investment in renewable energies. This paper provides an overview of current methodologies for assessing photovoltaic potential, with the aim of supporting the selection of optimal sites in a given region of interest. With a special focus on the Italian context, an additional goal of this work is to show that fast and accurate estimates of the power of new photovoltaic installations can be obtained by detecting available surface areas (e.g. by cadastral maps or image analysis). The basic average solar radiation and temperature for some specific areas can indeed be obtained from the available solar maps reported in the geodatabases of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC). On the basis of such data, as an alternative to a query in the on-line Photovoltaic Geographical Information System - PVGIS - (the web-based reference tool for the performance assessment of photovoltaic plants in Europe and Africa), the use of simple and appropriate polynomials is proven to be suitable for a quick analysis of solar energy potential applications. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.