Solar Panels

Hi

Many houses in my area are being tagged with Plant (station) from the Power Tab. I assume this is because they have solar panels. Is there are more explicit way of tagging this. On edit it looks like Congleton (Chehsire) has huge numbers of power Stations!

John

Hi John & Felicity,

Yes they should be tagged with plant=generator with various solar tags (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_Kingdom/Rooftop_Solar_PV for this and some other details). If on a roof use location=roof. Mapping rooftop solar has been a big thing since March last year, and we are just shy of 300k OSM elements in the UK: Congleton is still relatively underpopulated. The initial objective is better prediction of short-term fluctations of solar energy delivered to the grid (“nowcasting”) which can potentially save millions of pounds and reduce use of greenhouse-gas generating standby power sources.

You can also check numbers mapped vs. anticipated numbers based on installations which are part of the Feed in Tariff scheme on Gregory’s website: http://osm.gregorywilliams.me.uk/solar/cheshire-east.html. This latter does suggest that those in Congleton are being picked up, so are tagged with generator not plant.

It turns out to be much easier to find & add these rooftop installations independent of mapping other things (and until a couple of months ago imagery was often indifferent). Therefore depending on location they will not be associated with an OSM building and may not be perfectly placed. New imagery & some other open data sets mean that progressively these things can be improved (whilst adding other information about the solar panel: direction & module count).

openinframap.org also shows this solar power (https://openinframap.org/#8.59/53.2138/-2.1221/L,P,S,T), so we have quite a few data consumers using this information. The data itself has been formally published in Nature Scientific Data in the last week or so.

HTH