School of Engineering PhD student Siddarth Joshi leads 1st study to assess global rooftop solar electricity potential

22 Oct 2021

The first detailed global assessment of the electricity generation potential of rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) technology has been conducted by researchers at MaREI, the SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine in University College Cork (UCC), in collaboration with international research partners. The findings are published in Nature Communications. 

The research team including lead author Siddharth Joshi, together with UCC colleagues Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir, Dr Paul Holloway and colleagues at Imperial College London, Columbia University, and Ahmedabad University, assessed the electricity generation potential of rooftop solar PV globally and the associated costs. The authors mapped 130 million km² of global land surface area to identify 0.2 million km² of rooftop area using a novel Machine Learning algorithm. This rooftop area was then analysed to quantify the global electricity generation potential of rooftop solar PV.  

More details can be found here