Estimating rooftop solar power potential with drones

Bulgarian GIS and spatial solutions company, Geographica, was commissioned by the Municipality of Sofia in 2021 to gather data to be used for two different projects:

1. Estimate the rooftop solar power potential of the city
2. Calculate the number of trees and green areas in each neighborhood.

The company was able to collect 2,136 ha / 5,281 ac of data in only 6 hours by flying two eBee X drones with S.O.D.A. cameras in a multi-drone mission managed in eMotion flight planning software.

Results:

• Safe flights over people in Sofia, with a population of 1,284,000 (2021).
• Roof measurements (from DSM and orthomosaic) to analyze the opportunity to install photovoltaic panels.
• Area calculations and tree counts for each green zone in the city of Sofia, without the need for lidar data.
• Multi-use dataset for further use in several other city projects
• Safe flights in the surroundings of the country’s main airport
• Reduced data capture time by 50% by flying multi-drone missions simultaneously
• Reduced insurance costs of the multi-drone approach
• Another successful project cementing the company’s collaboration with the municipality and government

 Learn more about the challenges and the ROI of the project in this webinar. 

*Please note that, due to the large scale of the project, the dataset contains only a fraction of the entire data.