A Customized JAVA OpenStreetMap Preset to Extract Solar Panel Installations for Humanitarian Purposes

The use of clean and renewable energies, such as solar power, is essential for improving local economies, reducing reliance on scarce fossil fuels, and mitigating climate change. However, although solar power harvested using PhotoVoltaic (PV) cells has grown significantly in recent years, the actual amount of energy produced is unknown and challenging to define because of the lack of geographic data on the number of PV panels installed on rooftops. Due to the low spatial resolution of open-source satellite images, free surveying PV small-scale installations is currently not feasible. YouthMappers, an academic network dedicated to the creation and use of open mapping for development and humanitarian purposes, offers a possible solution. Indeed, it is an effective method to gather free detailed information on a large scale thanks to the support of high-resolution satellite images such as MapBox, Bing, or DigitalBox in an open-source environment, like Java OpenStreetMap (JOSM). As a result, in this study, an ad hoc tool written in JOSM was created to map PV panels on rooftops manually. This preset collects all of the information needed to describe PV panel features, such as type, size, and orientation, and calculate the amount of energy produced. Furthermore, its interface is simple and easy to use for both Information Technology (IT) and non-IT users. All data collected is stored in a geodatabase accessible to local governments, communities, industries, and scientists, allowing for a global overview of installed PV panel systems, the potential amount of energy produced, and the tracking of their evolution over time.