CEEP researchers (including our own Job Taminiau) have published a paper in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews that analyzes the solar city concept and assesses Seoul’s rooftop solar electric potential.

The paper discusses energy economy restructuring at the city level as an essential prong in any strategy that aims to address the dual energy and climate change challenges. Cities form hubs of human activity that are accompanied by high levels of energy consumption and emissions but also contain existing resources and infrastructure to transition to a greener energy economy. This  paper reviews efforts to date to define the ‘solar city’ concept and assessment methods for estimating the solar electric potential of an often neglected but vital city resource in energy matters – its rooftop real estate.

An illustrative case study is provided, using the City of Seoul, South Korea. The research demonstrates that a technical potential equivalent to almost 30% of the city’s annual electricity consumption can be supplied by widespread deployment of rooftop-based distributed photovoltaic systems. Using the methodology developed in the paper, we estimate that sixty-six percent of the annual daylight-hours electricity needs of the City of Seoul can be served by distributed solar power systems on a typical day. Read more>>