| Abstract |
Historical structures are an integral part of almost every city. To meet the global goal of decarbonizing human activities, reducing their negative impacts on the environment, mitigating climate change, and reflecting the need for the use of renewable energy sources (RESs), these structures must become part of a national energy grid and where possible actively act as prosumers/producers of on-site energy. Since preserving the cultural values of monuments is the main objective, photovoltaic (PV) integration in historical structures is a complex issue and the suitability of the intervention in terms of its effectiveness, possible extents, degree of invasiveness, specific technological aspects, and so on should always be adequate and precisely assessed and verified per parts. Although there exist many particular shining examples of PV appliance applications in historical context throughout the world, their large-scale integration requires automatization for the preliminary estimation of PV’s benefits/contributions in the Smart City/Positive Energy District concepts. Authors are of the opinion that a key role in this context could play information technologies and data modeling as a very applicable analytical/design tool. Whereas cities/city centers usually consist of a large number of building structures, Geographic Information Systems enable users to handle such a large amount of big data. Nowadays, it is common to analyze the solar potential of roof surfaces, used in solar cadastres. Esthetic and visual impact is usually suppressed. Therefore the authors develop the methodology for implementing this issue in the preliminary phase of building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) integration in historic structures which includes the following extensions/attributes: Machine learning processes for recognition of roof material, Assessing the impact on the fifth façade—roof landscape, silhouettes, skylines, and valuable/protected view, An urban scale comparison of variable roof surfaces energy potential due to their diverse geometry and the movement of the sun to create a hierarchy of suitable roof surfaces for BIPV integration. © 2025 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
