How to estimate the best location for solar panel farm

[NadaKadhim]

Hello everyone,

To begin, I need a little assistance. I'm just learning how to use ArcGIS Pro to explore solar possibilities.

Could you please teach me how to determine the best land allocation for solar panel farms?

If you could give me links to tutorials, videos, or any other documents that I might follow to learn how to use ArcGIS Pro to accomplish that step-by-step, I would be very grateful for your assistance.

With gratitude in advance.

[LRMInfoSection]

I'm sure you can simulate sun exposure in GIS, I think that would be a good place to start. This sort of thing (ShadeMap - Simulate sun shadows for any time and place on Earth).

From there you could calculate which areas have the most sun throughout the year. 

[NadaKadhim]

Thank you very much for your response and help!

I just wonder if there are some steps I can follow to determine the best location of the solar fram!

I will highly appreciate it.

[RyanDeBruyn]

@NadaKadhim 

ArcGIS Pro has the Solar Radiation Tools you can use to analyze and to create an insolation surface from an elevation surface or DSM (digital surface model).  The result of this analysis could be one variable in your Optimal Site analysis for a solar farm.

If you have not yet already discovered these Solar tools.  Here are some links. (Requires Spatial Analyst extension)
https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/spatial-analyst/how-raster-solar-radiation-w...
https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/spatial-analyst/raster-solar-radiation.htm

For finding best locations you can look into Weighted Overlay to solve multicriteria problems such as site selection and suitability models
https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/spatial-analyst/how-weighted-overlay-works.h...

Tutorials:

https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/estimate-solar-power-potential/

https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/site-a-sustainable-shrimp-farm/

 The ArcGIS Spatial Analyst community page has additional resources and is a good place for tool specific questions.

Good luck!

-Ryan

[EmbertMorton]

This is a great beginner question—ArcGIS Pro's solar radiation tools are perfect for this kind of analysis. I'd recommend starting with the "Area Solar Radiation" geoprocessing tool and looking into aspect, slope, and shadow layers. Combining those with land use data gives a solid foundation for site suitability. There are also some great tutorials on Learn ArcGIS

[RyanDeBruyn]

I agree this is a great question one the we will build on for training materials, analysis demos and future blogs.

I'd like to add the note, for analyzing raster surfaces, the Raster Solar Radiation tool provides enhanced functionality or performance from the Area Solar Radiation tool. The Area Solar will be deprecated in a future release.  

See additional details in my earlier reply above.