A comprehensive energy-oriented approach for optimization of solar potential in urban contexts: an application study for residential districts

There is a growing interest to utilize renewable energies especially solar energy as sustainable resources in urban contexts. This paper establishes a novel framework to highlight the most effective morphological factors for improving solar access of buildings. The study follows a systematic procedure, including: (1) the most effective factors have been highlighted through statistical methods, (2) selected effective parameters are combined to define different scenarios for optimization of solar potential in neighbourhoods and (3) at the final step, the fitness of optimized scenarios is assessed by executing confirmation run. These simulations are carried out on residential neighbourhoods in city of Yazd with hot and dry climate. The significant difference between the maximum and minimum temperature during a day and different seasons is an important characteristic of this climate. It was confirmed that the height of building has the largest contribution to the value of solar incident when compared to other significant factors, including ratio of building footprint over site area and street width. The proposed scenarios show the optimized combination of these three parameters for selected neighbourhood configurations. The results of this study can be applied as guidelines in architecture and urban planning to use solar energy in residential neighbourhoods.