Solar

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

Solar is a national digital dataset representing photovoltaic solar panel information across urban areas for each state and territory of Australia. The Solar dataset has relationships with the Buildings and G-NAF products produced by Geoscape Australia.

Solar is populated from two different capture sources and the population of the product schema will vary between these as follows:

  • Urban (satellite source) - areas with a population greater than 200, or with significant industrial/commercial activity in a visual assessment, digitised from satellite imagery.

  • Urban (aerial source) - areas with a population greater than 200, or with significant industrial/commercial activity in a visual assessment, digitised from aerial imagery.

Geoscape Australia welcomes your feedback on the Solar product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website (www.geoscape.com.au).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 20 December 2023 with data extracted on 15 December 2023.

  • This release is a full national data population for Version 1.0 of the Solar product, described by the Solar Product Guide v1.0.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

This release includes updates for the areas listed in the table below.

Locations of updated areas by State

State

Location

Urban Area (km2)

NSW

Broken Hill City Council

50

NSW

Federation Council

20

NSW

Goulburn Mulwaree Council

59

NSW

Muswellbrook Shire Council

20

NSW

Singleton Council

48

NSW

Unincorporated - Far West Area

1

QLD

Noosa Shire

211

QLD

Sunshine Coast Regional

906

SA

Port Augusta City Council

75

TAS

Brighton Council

83

TAS

Burnie City Council

37

TAS

Central Coast Council

93

TAS

Clarence City Council

252

TAS

Derwent Valley Council

3

TAS

Devonport City Council

61

TAS

Glenorchy City Council

47

TAS

Hobart City Council

39

TAS

Kingborough Council

93

TAS

Latrobe Council

49

TAS

Launceston City Council

106

TAS

Meander Valley Council

20

TAS

Northern Midlands Council

63

TAS

Sorell Council

94

TAS

Southern Midlands Council

3

TAS

Waratah-Wynyard Council

29

TAS

West Tamar Council

52

VIC

Banyule City

15

VIC

Bayside City

37

VIC

Boroondara City

30

VIC

Brimbank City

69

VIC

Casey City

11

VIC

Darebin City

21

VIC

Frankston City

65

VIC

Glen Eira City

31

VIC

Glenelg Shire

40

VIC

Hobsons Bay City

63

VIC

Indigo Shire

14

VIC

Kingston City

8

VIC

Latrobe City

27

VIC

Maribyrnong City

31

VIC

Melbourne City

38

VIC

Melton City

21

VIC

Merri-Bek City

19

VIC

Moonee Valley City

30

VIC

Mornington Peninsula Shire

299

VIC

Port Phillip City

21

VIC

Stonnington City

22

VIC

Wyndham City

70

VIC

Yarra City

20

WA

City of Albany

111

WA

City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder

48

WA

Shire of Esperance

35

Total

3710

^ Location names are derived from intersection with the most recent Local Government Area dataset.

Spatial files of the updated areas are available upon request via support@geoscape.com.au.

Change Notifications

ESRI Shapefile width increase

Commencing with the February 2024 release, the width of numeric fields within Esri Shapefiles will increase by one. This is due to a bug fix in our packaging application. This change only impacts Shapefile metadata, the values and precision remain unchanged.

Removal of the ‘Documents’ folder from data packages

From November 2023, Geoscape will be progressively moving product descriptions, guides and reports online to https://docs.geoscape.com.au

Commencing with the May 2024 release, data packages will no longer include the Documents folder.

Issues

New Issues

No new issues.

Resolved Issues

No resolved issues.

Known Issues

Solar polygons cut off at the edge of capture areas

Where a solar polygon is captured that crosses the edge of a capture area, the portion of the solar array that is outside will not be included in the product. This occurs in a small number of instances and will result in smaller than real-world solar_area and daily_estimated_power values.

Incorrect capture of solar polygons

Solar hot water heating, swimming pool heating and other rooftop features such as air-conditioning units can incorrectly be captured as solar polygons. These features are removed from the data where possible as they do not represent photovoltaic solar. Geoscape intends to continue to improve our processes to reduce these occurrences over time.

Solar type accuracy for low-resolution capture

Where a solar polygon is captured using imagery with resolution greater than or equal to 10cm, there is a reduction in the correctness of the solar_type classification. This often causes monocrystalline panels to be assigned with a ‘Thin-film’ solar_type value as individual panels cannot be differentiated in the imagery. Daily estimated power outputs for these records will be lower than the real-world value.

Future Considerations

This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.

Z-values

Geoscape is considering including z-values for the solar table that would provide heights for each vertex of a solar polygon. There is potential for this information to be used to derive other attributes, such as the aspect of the solar panel.

Aspect

Geoscape is considering including an ‘aspect’ attribute that would describe the direction that the solar panel is facing. This attribute could potentially be used to improve estimates of the power generated by the solar array.

Improvements to Daily Estimated Power

Geoscape intends to further improve the daily_estimated_power attribute. For this improvement we would potentially assess the impact of the:

  • resolution of the imagery used to capture the solar polygon

  • aspect of the solar polygon

  • roof_shape of the building related to the solar polygon

  • surrounding heights of buildings, trees and other features such as mountains that could potentially shade the solar array and reduce the power output

Adjustments to this estimate will be made from the results of this assessment.

Annex A – Release Counts

Additional, retired and total Localities counts and the percent change to the previous release have been listed in the table below.

TABLE

ACT

NSW

NT

OT

QLD

SA

TAS

VIC

WA

TOTAL

solar

Additional

0

39,129

0

0

59,661

7,605

79,525

382,587

17,512

586,019

Retired

0

9,305

0

0

13,654

0

0

247,414

0

270,373

Updated

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Total

129,928

1,706,714

43,459

0

1,855,848

635,206

79,525

1,251,328

1,029,188

6,731,196

% Change

0.00%

1.78%

0.00%

0.00%

2.54%

1.21%

100.00%

12.11%

1.73%

4.92%

solar_solar_address

Total

298,010

3,239,124

82,959

0

2,337,873

813,349

93,818

2,795,132

1,538,812

11,199,077

solar_address

Total

202,981

3,583,973

76,541

52

2,235,473

812,943

240,737

3,119,614

1,181,368

11,453,682

solar_building

Total

240,653

4,246,052

118,337

337

3,103,461

1,350,208

436,195

4,020,779

1,760,302

15,276,324