GIScience can facilitate the development of solar cities for energy transition

Abstract

The energy transition is increasingly being discussed and implemented to cope with the growing environmental crisis. However, great challenges remain for effectively harvesting and utilizing solar energy in cities related to time and location-dependant supply and demand, which needs more accurate forecasting- and an in-depth understanding of the electricity production and dynamic balancing of the flexible energy supplies concerning the electricity market. To tackle this problem, this article discusses the development of solar cities over the past few decades and proposes a refined and enriched concept of a sustainable solar city with six integrated modules, namely, land surface solar irradiation, three-dimensional (3D) urban surfaces, spatiotemporal solar distribution on 3D urban surfaces, solar photovoltaic (PV) planning, solar PV penetration into different urban systems, and the consequent socio-economic and environmental impacts. In this context, Geographical Information Science (GIScience) demonstrates its potent capability in building the conceptualized solar city with a dynamic balance between power supply and demand over time and space, which includes the production of multi-sourced spatiotemporal big data, the development of spatiotemporal data modelling, analysing and optimization, and geo-visualization. To facilitate the development of such a solar city, this article from the GIScience perspective discusses the achievements and challenges of (i) the development of spatiotemporal big data used for solar farming, (ii) the estimation of solar PV potential on 3D urban surfaces, (iii) the penetration of distributed PV systems in digital cities that contains the effects of urban morphology on solar accessibility, optimization of PV systems for dynamic balancing between supply and demand, and PV penetration represented by the solar charging of urban mobility, and (iv) the interaction between PV systems and urban thermal environment. We suggest that GIScience is the foundation, while further development of GIS models is required to achieve the proposed sustainable solar city.