[Talk-GB] Solar tagging app

[Gregory Williams]

On Sun, 2020-11-08 at 15:17 +0000, Jeremy Harris wrote:
> On 19/10/2020 20:14, Gregory Williams wrote:
> > I've now got round to updating the code on my solar comparison site
> Suggestion for further improvement:  When a building is identifiable
> associated with a set of generators, only count one for comparison
> against the FIT data.  Then (say) a house with panels on two
> different
> roof-faces will not over-count for the geographical region.
> 
> (I just found an LSOA with 4 of 13 mapped.  But 2 were on one home.
> A terrace too, so now I must split it, so the 1 on another home in
> the block is really distinct)

Jeremy,

That certainly is one reason why the "completeness" figure is just a
guide, rather than an absolute. Perhaps you've seen that there are, for
example, some regions that have greater than 100% "completeness", and
I'm sure that multiple installations on a property does contribute to
this. Comparison with the FiT register will always never be perfect,
since as external observers we don't really know whether the multiple
sets of modules on a property are part of the same or separate FiT
contracts.

If the multiple instances on property have the same roof orientation
then you could use a multipolygon to collate those instances together.
Obviously this wouldn't be suitable for the multiple-roof scenario that
you describe, though.

You've also, pointed towards one of the gotchas that only counting a
single installation per property would currently have in many places.
We've got plenty of places where a terrace of houses have only been
mapped as a single building. Thus several installations, each on
separate properties, would only appear to be one installation when on a
single terrace building. It does, of course, give an incentive to go
out and map the addresses individually, of course! :-)

I'll consider how implementing this may be done in the code, but I
think it'll need some general tidying of it first; so wouldn't
necessarily be available straight away.

BTW, the code does actually do something similar already wrt solar
farms, to avoid overcounting the individual lines of modules in a
plant.

Cheers,

Gregory