Prospects of PV application in unregulated building rooftops in developing countries: A perspective from Saudi Arabia

The study aims to investigate the potential for rooftop application of solar PV in the residential sector of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) taking into account the two main types of buildings i.e. apartments and villas. It is the first detailed study in KSA which focuses on the utilizability of building rooftops considering various structural, services and cultural parameters. The work employs remote sensing and GIS techniques to gather the building rooftop data for a district in the city of Al-Khubar covering 33,000 residential units. The data was validated through site visits of sampled buildings and regression models were created to examine the relationships between PV areas and the roof areas in the study area. PVSOL software was then used to model the application of PV on building rooftops and to determine the impact of shading. Frequency of occurrence of hurdles impacting the application of PV has been determined. It is found that currently 21% and 28% of the respective apartment and villa rooftops can be effectively used for PV application. The total rooftops in the study area amounting to 14.21 km2 are estimated to annually deliver 796 GWh of PV electricity. The work also concludes that through policy intervention the utilizability of rooftops and subsequent power output can be increased by 22.5%. Owing to similarities in structural and architectural features, the regression models and the findings of the study can be used and applied to the building sectors across all of the countries in the GCC region.