Evaluation of solar access

• The prediction of the utilisation potential of solar energy for both passive and active applications is usually based on tabular or analytical methods that use averaged irradiation data.

• These methods allow the user to get results only at specific points and are nearly useless when applied to urban sites, since the complexity of urban geometries and inter-reflection and shadowing effects cannot be accounted for easily.

• Recently, some Radiance based procedures have been proposed in order to obtain high dynamic range (HDR) images capable of quantifying solar access reliably and taking into account sky anisotropy, inter-reflection and shadowing phenomena and hourly or sub-hourly sequences of irradiance/irradiation data.