A Fast GIS-tool to Compute the Maximum Solar Energy on Very Large Terrains

This study presents a new functionality of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to assess solar energy input on vast high resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). This tool is able to find out 1) the maximum solar energy that can be captured on a surface situated at a determined hight on each point of the DEM and 2) the optimal angles (i.e., slope and orientation) that allow capturing this maximum energy. Insolator: the open source high performance solar radiation model, we developed in a previous work, is used as baseline for this tool. Contrarily to most existent GIS tools, the proposed algorithm doesn’t suffer memory limitations and is specially suitable for GPU-CPU heterogeneous systems. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to compute the maximum irradiation and optimal angles maps on large DEMs with high accuracy in very short times and showing a high scalability.