ANNOUNCEMENTS
According to the Indian Renewable Energy industry report 2020, the RE sector in India is the world's 4th most appealing. As of 2020, in terms of wind energy and installed capacity of renewable energy, India has been ranked 4th and for solar energy India has been ranked 5th. Over the last several years, the generation capability of the installed renewable power has increased. The renewable energy sector has managed to gain more and more attention from the investors, with the help of increasing assistance from the government and improved economics. This would be very helpful because India is trying to fulfil its own requirement of energy, that is aimed to reach about 15,800 TWh by the year 2040, according to the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE).
Solar power is environment friendly and is being promoted by government agencies and power distribution companies. The government can use the process of solar panel detection using satellite or aerial imageries to offer benefits, to people who use the solar power by installing solar photovoltaic panels, such as excusing taxes and providing credits. Decision makers may utilize it to assess uptake and develop plans to raise awareness and encourage solar power use in places where it is currently underutilised. This study hence, attempts to develop an algorithm which can identify solar photovoltaic power systems using satellite imagery. Object based image analysis was used in the algorithm for image classification which had an overall accuracy of 96.06 per cent. From this feature extraction for solar panels was done where the feature was converted from raster to vector form. Lastly the sizes of the solar panels were calculated.
This study would help to provide a solar power map for India, which would have detected locations for the existing solar panels installed in various parts of the country, using high resolution satellite imagery used in a machine learning algorithm. This map would help in tracking the existing solar potential of the country and also in achieving the desired RE potential using solar power, as decided by the government of India.
