We passed a couple of milestones a few days ago: - 20% of FIT totals - 170k individual panels mapped (excluding those in solar farms)
In terms of coverage there are now well over 50 LAs (all in England & Wales) with more than 50% of solar installations mapped, with around 10 exceeding 80%. Areas with good coverage are: - Scottish Central Belt: helped no doubt by more atomic data much of the Central Belt is around 20% mapped. - North-East (former Tyne & Wear): Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and North & South Tyne. - North Wales: Conwy, Flint, Denbigh & Wrexham. Most panels in the first three are in the coastal resort towns, but reasonable rural coverage. - North West: recent activity has been around Preston, Blackburn Wigan and Chorley. - East Midlands: mainly Leics & Notts. Improved & recent imagery for Leicester made a huge difference. - West Midlands: Warwickshire, Worcestershire & Herefordshire are roughly in the 20-30% zone. ALso extending into the South Wales valleys. brianboru's detailed mapping in the latter is another good index of rural coverage. - South Coast: Bournemouth area & Southampton, all at over 50% More rural areas continue to be challenging: older imagery which is often difficult to interpret doesn't help. I've experimented in places where every building is already mapped by stepping through each building, but still one may only find 20% of the number in FIT. London and immediately adjacent areas also have relatively little mapped. Imagery can be a problem, but also finding panels in older and/or larger housing with more complex roof shapes is hard. One thing I'm continually amazed at is how many places have buildings mapped, which is very helpful for this task. However in a couple of places: Ribble Valley & Leicester - it is clear that better imagery would allow existing building outlines to be improved, but also that plenty of buildings have been extended, demolished or replaced. This type of activity lends itself to combined work using tools such as Tasking Manager or MapRoulette and might be worth considering in the future for a quarterly project. There's still no shortage of places where a lot of panels can be mapped quickly, although more systematic mapping of a single LA often requires a couple of passes over imagery. Looking forward to achieving the next milestones of 200k & 25%. Jerry Personally, I'm concentrating on areas adjacent to the existing well-mapped (50%+) areas with the aim of extending these areas.
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