Pilsen - Solar equipment in the city park

CHALLENGE

To improve the lives of its citizens, the City of Pilsen has decided to install solar benches, cameras, parking meters and potentially other smart devices in one of the city parks. Since the city does not want to build electrical infrastructure for each of the devices, all of them have to be solar-powered. Therefore, it is necessary to place the devices or their external solar panels in locations with sufficient sunlight.

In the case of cameras, it is vital to find ideal locations for their installation with regards to the field of view.

STATUS : started

LOCATION : Czech Republic, Pilsen

TARGET AUDIENCE : public, experts

APPROACH

Use the DUET mapping platform to identify locations with sufficient sunshine for the installation of planned equipment.

The platform can also be used to identify locations with a suitable field of view for the installation of cameras. However, this functionality will not be tested.

EXPECTED OUTCOME

The expected outcome is finding suitable locations and count of the devices in the city park for the installation of the facilities. Working with the DUET platform can also lead to building a self-sufficient solar network and the possibility of building a network of smart devices and sensors (IoT) that can use solar energy.

How to use

Open Use case Pilsen – Solar equipment in the city park. Creating an account and logging into the application is not required to work with this use case. All features are available without logging in.

In the “Content” menu, layers from the data catalog are prepared and enabled: Plzen 3D trees, Plzen – 3D buildings and Plzen – 3D Terrain model:

Layers display

Turn on “toggle shadows” and then “shadow settings” (wrench symbol) in the upper right corner of the map window:

Toggle shadows

On the left side of the application, you will see the options for displaying shadows:

Shadow settings

Here you can select the moment of the day and the day of the year for which you want to see a shadow impact simulation by moving the sliders shown in the image above. This allows you to see places on the map that are in shade or in direct sunlight most of the day.

In our case, this way we can find the places in the park that are exposed to the sun as much as possible and are also suitable for the location of the selected device. We can mark these locations by drawing on the map and exporting the resulting map as a PDF file.