Roberto Andrade Martínez
Introduction
In light of the rising demand for electricity on a global scale, and the need for it to come from non-fossil sources as much as possible, one alternative to look at is renewable energy.
Given the space constraints to install a considerable capacity in most urban areas, one out-of-the-box possibility is to look at land already used for something else. Like, residual water plants, and landfills, among others.
This project downloaded ten years of climate data from Copernicus –the European Union Earth observatory– for two very different countries regarding their amount of sunlight: Spain and Germany, to obtain the energy potential of installing PV panels on land with a land-use designation such as dump.
Processing that data using Python, and in particular the library Atlite, it is possible to obtain the PV potential if installing panels on land with a certain designation, such as dump, for every hour of the period of interest.
The project objective is to
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Demonstrate that such output is big enough to be financially viable and successful.
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That the total production is consistent from year to year.