Rooftop Photovoltaic Potential for Swiss Buildings with Hourly Resolution

Alina Walch and colleagues at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne generated this dataset of rooftop photovoltaic potential for 9.6 million roof surfaces in Switzerland. The data provides hourly temporal resolution aggregated per building and roof type, incorporating meteorological conditions, local shading, and panel efficiency. The methodology and uncertainty estimates are detailed in a 2020 Applied Energy article.

Use Cases

• Modeling regional solar energy generation capacity based on aggregated building-level potential.
• Assessing the impact of roof characteristics like tilt and aspect angle on energy yield.
• Estimating uncertainty in photovoltaic output based on the provided meteorological and shading variables.
• Planning decentralized energy systems using geospatially aggregated potential data.

Strengths

• Covers 9.6 million individual roof surfaces, providing a large-scale national assessment.
• Includes hourly temporal resolution data aggregated to monthly-mean values for detailed analysis.
• Explicitly models key factors like local shading, sky coverage, and panel efficiency as a function of radiation and temperature.
• Provides estimates of uncertainty alongside the main variables, as documented in the referenced research.

Limitations

• Data is aggregated; access to individual roof surface data requires direct contact with the authors.
• Some aspects, like roof obstructions, were estimated based on data from a single canton (Geneva), which may limit generalizability.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from a separate metadata PDF file.

Provenance

Source

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, based on a national roof surface dataset from SwissTopo.

Collection Method

Computational modeling incorporating meteorological data, a Digital Surface Model, and efficiency functions, as described in Walch et al. (2020).

Geography

Switzerland